Wizards Of Waverly Place: Twilight Zone
by Thor2000
Summary: Alex gets her own adventure. She's trapped in an isolated and abandoned snowbound hotel without her magic with strangers and must use her mind and wits to try to escape and discover where she actually is.
1. Chapter 1

It was just another day in the life of nineteen-year-old Alex Russo. Wake up, wash, clean, dress then travel to Italy and stop her evil clone in Italy from taking over the world. It was all fairly routine for a young female wizard with inherent abilities and a proclivity to practice the science known as magic. Somewhere around a quarter to a third of the planet were magic-users… wizards, sorcerers, witches, warlocks… and Alex was among them. Not only was she now a recognized wizard in the magic community, but she was also the resident wizard in her family besides her brother who was now off teaching his knowledge of the world's magic to other future young wizard-users at a school in Germany, one of several in the world. She supposed that meant now that the Russo family now had two wizards in the family that the previous one-wizard rule was now out-dated, and she and her brother could stop looking embarrassed when wizards from England and Canada smirked at them and began chuckling at them. She did feel bad for her little brother though who had lost his magic, but he did once claim he wanted to run the family sub shop when he grew up.

Turning over in her bed, Alex pulled her sheets and blankets up and tried drifting back to sleep. She closed her eyes once more and tried to force back a yawn from her lips. Not ready to wake, she picked and rubbed away the crystals of dried tears from her eyes and once again sunk deep beneath her covers trying to stay asleep, but her brain was awake and reminding her to get up.

"You're no longer the lazy irresponsible Alex anymore." It reminded her. "You got rid of that part of yourself. It's time to get up and make a life for yourself."

Not only that, but she found herself wanting scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast.

Finally opening her big brown eyes and hoisting herself on her arms to sit up, Alex sat up in bed and found herself yawning once more. She blinked her eyes several times trying to focus then looked again across the room as her cotton woven sheets slipped off her form and her blankets peeled back like a blossom flower to her body erupting from bed.

This was not her bedroom.

Briefly taking all of a second to realize her strange surroundings, she felt her lips part in shock and looked around the room. It was large and grand, decorated a bit bland and austere, but it was not her room. Her bedroom was a large pink-shag lined room on the third floor over her parent's sandwich shop on Waverly Place in Lower Manhattan. She should have realized she was in an odd place when she realized she didn't hear all the sounds of traffic, pedestrians and distant police sirens. This room didn't even have a window. Her head bobbing around surprised and a bit scared with her long brunette tresses flitting around, Alex pushed her blankets and wraps off and poked her dainty toes to the floor where they landed on a clean blue-gray Seventies-style carpet stretching over the room. To her left, she realized she had her own bathroom with two sinks and two toilets in a lime-green and eggshell colored bathroom painted with yellow trim. Outside the bathroom doors in the bedroom was a bureau and upper cabinet built into a wall egress and on the other side of the bathroom was a closet with French doors. The furniture consisted of two chairs flanked by a small round table under a boring Isaac Worthington painting of kids playing in snow surrounded by wintry surroundings. By the door from the room, the dual bedroom doors descended down a few steps into the outer room.

"Mom? Dad?" Alex called ahead. "Justin, did you do this to me? Where am I?" She had the impression she was in a hotel. This place was certainly not laid out like someone's home with a kitchen and family room. The exterior room opened up into a room with striped wallpaper and a fireplace in the far wall and a sitting area in the center of the room. The chairs were lavender in color, and the lamps had yellow covers atop a blue-green carpet pattern. It all looked like a bad Seventies nightmare. By her left was a writing desk against the wall and a table with flowers on it by her right. The room possessed some sort of elegance, possibly best prepared for guests with means. Alex treaded forward lightly, listening carefully as she crossed the room. She was expecting her mother or Justin to enter the room looking for her. It was sure this was not one of the guest quarters at the Mecklenburg Academy, affectionately known as Wiz-Tech by her students, where Justin was now headmaster. The school was placed in an old Bavarian Castle with a mix of German, Celtic and Swiss furnishings. This place was all American from its furniture, décor and drapes.

Alex suddenly saw another figure out the corner of her eye and whirled around to see her reflection in the mirror on the door. The suite had a small foyer to the hall, and the doors to it were mirrored, and one of them was open to the room. Realizing she had just seen her reflection, she looked again and realized just how sheer her nightgown really was. It was practically transparent as the light in the room showed the shadow of her body through it and left nothing to the imagination. Reacting from the impropriety, Alex realized she was practically walking around nude and dashed back to the bedroom, attacking the nightstand and the bed looking for her wand. The nightstand by her side of the bed was empty, and so was the other. Just who dressed her in this sheer nearly transparent nightgown? Without her wand, it was going to be difficult to do a spell to change her attire. She was going to have to try it without it. Waving her hands over her head, nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing.

"Where's my magic?!" Alex was freaking. She'd have to dress the regular way. Whoever owned this room, she just had to hope they had left some clothes for her. Closest to the bureau, she pulled the first drawer she found and discovered underwear and undergarments. Whoever owned this stuff would just have to understand. In the closet, the wardrobe was limited to white sweaters and white slacks. It looked like the hotel uniform. Each sweater had an "H" and "O" embroidered over the heart in bold dark blue over-lapping cursive letters. It was just going to have to do for now. Ducking into the bathroom, she dressed and freshened herself with a blast of water to her face. She briefly brushed her long dark tresses and walked out of Room 358 a few minutes later wearing the clothes she had found in the room.

First thing she did was knock at the door of the room across from her suite. Getting no response, she peeked inside and found a smaller empty room with a bed and no window either. No one was in it to give her answers.

"Mom? Dad?" Alex treaded the Native American pattern in the hallway carpet. "Justin?" She was not getting any responses. "Very funny, but I want to go home now." She noticed elevators midway down the hall. Hitting the button for the elevator, she mentally cheered to know it was working, but when it opened its red doors, she paused. She did not want to be trapped in this thing between floors. Looking back the way she had come, she looked down the hall leading from the elevators to the third direction toward a large steel door marked for employees. There was an arch down there. It had to be for a stairway. When the elevator closed behind her, Alex opted for the alternative and marched toward the opening. It actually opened up into a large upper balcony area, and it did have access to a stairway.

Stretching wide across from her underneath was a large lounge with a giant grand fireplace with large dangling iron faux candle light fixtures. Decorated in a Native American motif with Navaho and Pueblo tapestries, it looked like the room where hotel guests would come and gather or enjoy a musical serenade. Her hair bobbing on her shoulders, Alex looked around for signs of life in this place. The stairs were carpeted in warm brown and split left and right at the bottom. The right half headed to the elevators arriving from the second floor without her, but the left half headed down toward tall windows reaching twenty-five feet over her head. There were five tall windows like this supported by thick adobe columns along the length of the room to the far end where another second floor balcony was supported high atop by arches. Each space under each window had its own sitting area of the snow-filled view beyond the place. The room itself had a hardwood floor with numerous carpets exploiting Native American designs and walls adorned in a multitude of flags and tapestries. From the windows, Alex could see tall pines in the distance lightly bending in the wind and beyond those tall snow-topped mountains in the distance. Was this place once a ski resort?

Where the hell was she?

The room itself was full of tables and chairs. The tables were long and the seating arrangements varied from straight-back wood chairs to easy chairs and long leather sofas. Long wooden beams cut from ancient redwoods held up the ceiling above. At the bottom of the stairs, was a grand piano replete with a bench and a glass snifter for tips.

"If this is a dream, it's the most elaborate dream I've ever had." Alex briefly played a few piano keys then heard child-like giggling from behind her. Her head turned left to the fleeting images of two young girls vanishing under the balcony.

"Hey!" She turned and chased after them into the pale green employee's access corridor in the alcove under the balcony. It ran the length of the lounge behind the elevators and grand fireplace, past wood doors heading back out and through another set of doors into another access corridor running the length of the hotel. She never caught a good sight of those young girls, but they looked to be twins with brown hair about eight to ten years in age dressed in powder blue dresses. They had vanished on her, but they did lead Alex to the main lobby of the hotel. It was empty and deserted.

"Where are you little brats?" Alex hissed. "Why are you hiding from me?" She whirled around looking for them. The lobby was darkened and deserted. It was colored in tan and dark brown with red square columns and Old West iron chandeliers. Sections of the lobby were separated into square sitting areas shaped by chairs and benches. A photograph-filled hallway with multiple glass entries lined one side, and the far end ended with a short corridor leading past elevators to an adobe-style winding staircase to the second floor. To one side, she recognized the hotel check-in area abandoned and deserted; its offices and adjacent rooms were dark and deserted. Filling the length of the front of the lobby with dull gray light struggling to illuminate the room, Alex saw snow piled four feet high against the entry way. Standing confused and unsure to just what had happened to her, she realized she was trapped in this place for the winter without her magic.

"Submitted for your approval…" The invisible observer to these events nervously postured with his cigarette. "Miss Alexandra Esmerelda Russo, a young and attractive practitioner to that field of bizarre and mysterious science known as magic. For all her life, Alex has always known what was going on in her life, but for perhaps the first time, her innate abilities have left her and she is stranded with nothing but questions. Alex now has to think and use her mind to save herself from her escape-proof prison and make it back to her own world, but she is going to discover first that this is no ordinary place. For this place is a presence of its own because every brick, every beam, every fixture, pipe, knickknack and piece of furniture comes directly to you from… The Twilight Zone…"


	2. Chapter 2

2

The phones were dead. For as far as she could see from the front windows, all she could see was snow. Her confusion had turned to frustration, and that turned to anger. Alex had attacked one of the chairs in the lobby and smashed it into the wall, shattering a picture, while losing her temper. She then tried one of the old style phone booths in the corner of the lobby, and when that failed to get her results, she tried to destroy that as well, moving into the hall and pulling down all the black and white photos from the wall, smashing them in the wall and scattering them through the lobby trying to see how far she could fling them. Whoever had trapped her here was going to be upset that she had trashed the place. She had never had a fit like this before in her life. She had once nearly come through the floor of her bedroom at home after having her wand taken away from her, but that was more of an accident. Her temper soon abated and turned to hunger, and she went searching for the kitchen. Surely, places like this had something left behind. The kitchen area was in the first place she checked beyond the employee corridor behind the lobby. It looked like a cast iron nightmare with in excess of ten sinks, twelve stoves, eight large industrial ovens and an abundance of prep and work areas. The pantry was fully stocked with a plethora of canned and baked goods, and the first freezer she checked was full of frozen chickens, hams, sides of beef and other carnivorous treats. She could live very comfortably in this place for the rest of her life if the extreme silence and loneliness didn't bother her. From the resources before her, she made herself not one but two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and poured herself a glass of chocolate milk from the walk-in refrigerator. Sitting at one of the wooden employee table in the stainless steel jungle that was the hotel kitchen, Alex glanced around her new surroundings eating her sandwich and tried to discern her situation.

"Okay, Justin…" She called out expecting a response. "This has all been very funny… Ha-ha… but you can bring me home now. I'd like to leave now…" She looked around expecting a reaction. "Max? Max, did you get your wizard powers back?" Alex looked down the hall past the head chef's office then sipped the last of her chocolate milk. "Creepy little girls?" She had not seen or heard from them in a while either.

"Can anyone hear me?" Alex called out then rose up with her plate and dirty glass to set in the sink at the wall. All she heard was the hum of the neon lights overhead, the air conditioning kicked on and the metal air vents expanding from the heat. At the end of the counter in the corner between her and the empty office was a large steel door with an exit sign above it. She had seen it earlier, but she hadn't checked it yet. Strolling up to it like the curious young girl she was, she felt the door itself. It was cold to the touch. Pressing against the handle showed it wasn't locked but popping it open was a big mistake. A gush of below zero wind and snowflakes flooded in around her, scattered the paperwork on the tote board by the door like leaves in the wind and stole all the warmth in her body. It was an exterior pathway to the outside, and the outside weather was filling it up with snow and ice, closing off that access to the property outside the hotel. Quickly pulling it shut again, Alex shuddered uncontrollably and shook from the cold and hastened to the stove area to warm up, switching on the burners under the range canopy and holding her hands over the stove burners turning red then bright orange until the chill left her bones. Once she felt warm again, she switched them back off and looked around the kitchen once more.

"Freezing cold outside…" She told herself. "Warm and toasty inside…" She turned on her heel in her all-white outfit and returned to the employee corridor, painted along the bottom a long dark evergreen and across the top a sickly sea green. Someone must have liked that combination to paint the employee corridors such a toxic combination. Right took her to the lobby restrooms and back to the lounge at the far end of the hotel, but she took the left way to explore the hotel and familiarize herself with the location. Along the way, she saw more storage areas and employee break areas plus more doors to the guest areas of the hotel and the behind-the-scene hidden egresses to the upper floors. The further she had traveled, the corridor became more industrial; there were less kitchen and food prep supplies once she passed the stacks of plastic shelves and stored metal carts, many of which had metal drink containers for tea or coffee. Spotting a sign for the boiler room, Alex turned back the way she had come and upon passing a set of double doors, she turned through some secluded doors in a small egress into a large ballroom from near the dance area.

"Wow…" She gasped and turned around in a pirouette to examine the room. The room was decorated in gold paint, dark green curtains and low-hanging chandeliers. It was filled with enough tables and chairs to seat at least three hundred hotel guests around a small area for dancing near a band area. Enclosed on three sides with high walls to a high ceiling with low hanging light fixtures, the grand ballroom was lined against the exterior hall by tall windows showing every detail of its exterior. They weren't as high as the windows in the lounge area, but they did give multiple glimpses from the hall into the ballroom. Strolling past the restrooms of this palatial party room, Alex found directly across from the guest entrance the bar area and freely admitted herself behind the counter without hesitation. There were glasses and decanters for every beverage possible but not an ounce of spirits to drink. There was neither a bottle of champagne nor a decanter of brandy. The undersides of the counter and the display behind definitely looked as of it was meant to hold every form of liquor and potion possible, but it was as empty as the cupboard in a haunted house. The beer tap was dry, and when pressed, it gently exhaled a waft of fresh air from its hoses.

"Guess my first glass of wine will have to wait a little bit longer…" Alex commiserated then noticed a placard in the next corner of the room diagonally across from her entrance from the employee access corridor, and it was her first sign of anything reflecting people once worked or served jobs here. It was the hotel welcome sign to the ballroom. It read: "The Gold Ballroom. Nightly Music, Dinner and Dancing with Live Music for All Hotel Guests. 7PM to 11PM. Large Parties Please Book In Advance."

"Live music, huh…" Alex sighed. "Well, maybe not tonight…" She had that scant image of the twins again just out of eye shot once more and looked up just as their blue dresses and brown hair vanished around the corner. Hitting the hall out side the ballroom with her feet pounding the floor under her, Alex charged after them down the hall past the length of the ballroom and sailed past the corner trying to catch up with them. They seemed ephemeral and more solid than mere spirits if that's what they were. They giggled and danced skipping away from her, somehow staying just always out of reach.

"Come back here!" Alex tore through the hallway to their images vanishing around another corner. "When I get my magic back, I am so making you brats miserable!" She dashed around another corner and found herself back at the lobby again, this time down the short hall next to the elevators and in view of the General Manager sign to the hotel offices. That was then she realized they had to be ghosts. Little kids were fast, but they couldn't materialize and disappear at will, and besides, these girls exuded something else. Their attire was not of this time, possibly late Twenties, Early Thirties. Modern girls did not wear dresses like those anymore nor barrettes that pulled their hair back to unobscure so much of their faces. Could she be chasing ghosts?

Her head lightly swaying tiredly, Alex tried fighting the feelings of paranoia filling her head. She was slowly unnerving herself. The isolation, the darkness, and the whistling wintry winds pounding the hotel… it was all slowly getting to her. Her hand moving up to her head on its own volition, she tried to hold on to her sanity by reminding herself of who she was. Her name was Alex Russo, she was nineteen years old, she lived at 1328 Waverly Place in New York City and her best friend's name was Harper Finkle. Her parent's names were Jerry and Theresa Russo, and although she was possibly not always the best daughter or sister, she had a whole life to make up her horrible behavior in the past to her family. Without meaning to, her body had turned right under the general manager's sign and she took the short hall next to the elevators into the office area. It was warm orange in color, the desk cleaned of all the stuff a hotel employee might take to leave his job on the last day. There was no nameplate, plants, pictures or anything of a personal nature. There was a desk blotter, a pencil sharper, a cup of pens, a stapler and a number of empty slots for hotel paperwork the dark brown phone, but it might as well be a rock because it got no signal. The door in the room exited into the employee access corridor running behind the lobby and admission desk. The portrait on the back wall looked like a fake window overlooking a serene winter scene as if Alex needed any more reminders she was snowbound by persons or spells unknown without her wand or any magic powers in the creepy hotel.

To her left, her eyes fell on a piece of electronic gear she didn't recognize. It had a number of numbers and dials and switches and knobs. The tiny factory nameplate on it read something she needed to turn the light on to read.

"Cunningham Electronics, 1967, Coleman Transistor Radio Ground System."

"Radio?" Alex felt a glimmer of hope and flipped on the power switch as dials and lights lit up and came to life on it. Grinning and breathing easier with the optimism and anticipation that she could be rescued soon, she turned one knob as the speaker squawked loudly with transistorized white noise and grabbed the speaker piece hanging off it. Her brother had one of these, and he could talk to people on them!

"Hello? Hello?" Alex tried speaking through the frequencies. "Any one out there?" She tried looking for a channel where people were talking. She briefly had voices then lost them by turning too far, turning back trying to get them back. "Hello? This is Alex Russo… please someone talk to me…" She got more cracking and loud shrieking from the radio waves. There had to be someone out there. There had to be a truck driver, a ship's captain, a tall good-looking boy scout… somebody! "I need help! I'm trapped in this hotel…"

"Hello, Alex…" A creepy voice came through the radio.

Alex froze and looked at the speaker.

"Ready to play yet?" It was a creepy little girl's voice erupting into sadistic cackling laughter.

Alex screamed and tried smashing the mouthpiece into the floor, but it bounced and sprang back up on its spiral cord. Jumping back in surprised and terrified fear, she grabbed the stapler and the cup of pens and hurled them at the radio trying to fight back, then stopped and realized she might have damaged her one hope to get out of the creepy hotel. The cup had shattered and the pens had scattered, but the stapler had just bounced off the edge in two parts. She couldn't tell if she had broken anything, but she switched it off and backed away from it in terror. Was that the plan? Was she trapped here to keep losing her mind until she was one of the ghosts too? Her head shaking, her lips trembling and eyes widened in shock and fear, she tried to stay defiant. She was a wizard… a powerless one, but she was not about to let herself get pushed around by a few ghosts.

The sound of furniture moving in the lobby aroused her attention.

Not wanting to go out, Alex closed her mouth that had been hanging open in fear and cleared her throat. Nervously treading out, she slowly inched in short steps out of the office and carefully peeked out into the lobby, checking the room in short bursts by blocking the room with the edge of the hall until she was completely out once more and could see all of the room. She didn't see a thing. Out the front of the hotel, it looked as if it had stopped snowing, but out above the snowdrifts piled up along the front entry, the sky looked a dark bluish-gray that meant more had to be coming. The subdued light cast long shadows behind the chairs and columns creating myriad shapes across Alex's path, but the employee access corridor ran the extent of the hotel, and there was a stairway in the hall behind the hotel lounge that went directly up to the hallway outside her suite on the second floor. She would take that route back up to her room even if she didn't want to stay in it, but upon passing the phone booths, she stopped and looked again. This room and the hallway corridor beside it should have been a mess from her earlier conniption fit. She had left two shattered chairs and all the pictures on the wall scattered and shattered around her, and now, the chairs were back whole and the pictures were restored back to the walls.

Someone or something had cleaned up after her!


	3. Chapter 3

3

"Meiha…" Theresa stroked her daughter's beautiful face and called her by her pet name for her. "Meiha…" Lying next to her on the sofa, Alex blinked and looked up tiredly from the sofa, her William Collins novel once flat to her chest now flipped shut by her side and falling to the floor. "Bedtime, honey…"

"What?" Alex blinked and looked around. "Where am I?"

"On the sofa…" Her father, Jerry Russo, was standing over her in a suit and tie after taking his wife out to dinner. "Have you been on this sofa since we left watching Stephen King movies?"

"Yeah…" Alex yawned and grinned quite relieved to be out of her dream. "Whoa… I had the creepiest dream that I was trapped in this huge spooky snowbound hotel by myself… It seemed so real."

"Well, dreams usually are…" Her mother kissed her cheek. "Why don't you go on to bed?" Theresa reverted from contented wife back to homemaker and picked up her daughter's two empty soda cans and bowl of cheese puffs.

"Yeah…" Alex wandered tiredly yawning toward the stairs of her New York City loft while scratching her abdomen. "I'm just so glad it was just a dream!"

"Well, it was…" Her father checked the door and locked. "And you don't need to worry about spooky hotels or creepy little girls here. Just go to bed…"

"Yeah…" Alex was half way up the stairs before she stopped and looked you her father. "Wait… How did you know there were two creepy little girls in my dream?"

"You told me."

"No, I didn't…"

"Good night, Alex…" Theresa looked up at her and started the dishwasher in the kitchen. Alex just narrowed her eyes at them curiously then forced another step up the metal staircase to the next floor. That was weird. How did her father know about those two strange girls? She was positive she hadn't mentioned them. Strolling past her room, she felt that creepy feeling coming over her as she headed to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Somehow, she felt she was still dreaming. The building seemed quiet tonight; she couldn't even hear her parents talking downstairs. The air was also cold as if she had walked into the path of the air-conditioning but this was the middle of December. Christmas was coming up and she was looking forward to the gifts, the cookies and the unique candy that only came out during this part of the year. Her breath appearing in the air in front of her face, she started unbuttoning her jeans to use the toilet and pushed the door ahead of her to enter the bathroom. The door creaked open not to her pale powder blue bathroom but to the sea green and ivory white bathroom with the dual toilets, dual sinks and support brace to the elevated bathtub in her dream. The same yellow strip separated the two colors above and below just like the bathroom in her dream. Her breath started quickening, and her eyes widened in shock. She was no longer dreaming, the hotel was real and her parents and home had been a figment of her imagination. Behind her, the exact same bedroom with the blue hexagonally shaped pattern carpet was behind her. Tears dropped down her face. She had been here for over five days.

"I was out!" She screamed. "I was out!" She screamed again clutching her head and losing her mind. "No!" She dropped to the floor in the bathroom doorway. "I was out!" Her emotions and sanity was decaying inside her. She hadn't even worn the nightgown again. She had been wearing the same white sweater and slacks since her third day here. "Nooooo…." Alex broke down crying and pleading for mercy. "I want to go home! Please, let me go home! Justin, I know you can hear me! Please let me come home!" She bawled and wept with her eyes full of tears and her lips and chin quivering with fear and sadness. "I'm sorry for everything I ever did to you! Just let me come home! I-I-I don't want to stay here!" Curled up in the fetal position by her bed, she screamed out with emotional distress exploding from her heart. "Please… let me go home…" Her breathy voice quaked and came in short bursts from her lungs. It had been five days… Five days of exploring the location, eating peanut butter sandwiches and playing games in the hotel game room for five days without seeing or talking to anther person. Someone had to know she was missing.

"I want to go home…." Alex lay curled up distraught and desperate for human contact on the carpet between the bed and bathroom. Silently weeping, she cried and moaning under her quivering breath. She barely recalled her home and what it looked like. How many steps was it from the shop up to the loft? How far was the low overhead beam over the basement steps before her father whacked his head into it? She was missing the smell of the bread from the shop, that juicy scent of the meats her father cooked for the sandwiches and the smells from the Korean Deli across the street from the balcony. It was all becoming faint memories to her. Crying and weeping, Alex realized just how much she hated the silence of this place. It was just too stinking quiet. At least from the lounge downstairs, she could hear the wind whistling, and the snow being blown around outside. In here, she could hear the AC kicking on and warming the hotel as the vents expanded and creaked from the heat.

From far beyond that sound, she finally heard something else from the floor. It sounded like distant voices, but they were getting closer and closer. She could distinguish one voice talking and then another that sounded more demure. Was it the ghosts? She'd never heard them talking before, nor had she heard anything like communication. They sounded briefly like they were right outside her room then they started getting faint again. They were leaving her. Fearing she could be losing them, Alex jumped to her feet and rushed through her suite into her foyer and in to the hallway with the presence of a bullet fired from a gun. Coming to a stop, her eyes panned around once and saw two girls near the elevators midway down the hall. The blonde was about her size, the brunette maybe a bit shorter. They were both also wearing the same complimentary hotel attire of white sweaters and white slacks and staring back at her with startled confusion. The brunette was a bit thinner; the blonde maybe a bit more athletic. Alex stood watching them unsure they were real.

"Who's that?" They were waiting for the elevator.

"I don't know." The blonde girl with the brown eyes looked a bit spooked. "Why is she looking at us like that?"

Alex suddenly charged, and the two girls screamed and raced down the hall from the opening elevator. She chased them down the hall to the front of the hotel where they rushed hurriedly down the stairs. Her feet pounding the brown, red and tan carpet under her feet, Alex heard them screaming down the hall and rushed to catch them before they got away from her. They were fast, but she thought she could catch up with them. Rushing past one entry hall, they separately found themselves in the game room where the girls grabbed the pool sticks for the billiard tables to use as weapons then turned to face Alex trying to get at them.

"Who are you?" Alex faced them over the billiard table. "How did you get in here?"

"Don't touch us!" The blonde threatened to hit her first. "I swear I'll break this over your head!"

"Are you real?!" Alex demanded to know. "Are you real?!"

"Of course, we're real!" The brunette held Alex at bay. "Who are you?! What is this place?!" She threatened to hit Alex with the cue stick, but she was genuinely surprised when Alex smiled as if letting go of an enormous weight and shaking her head in relief. She seemed thankful to be finding them. The Hispanic beauty turned to her new friend. "Maddie?"

Maddie Fitzpatrick gradually lowered her improvised weapon as Alex started crying in deep relief to not be so alone and hugged Gabriella. A few minutes ago, Maddie had wakened in this strange place from within a small suite off the back hall behind the hotel with an exterior balcony facing the mountain. Not sure how she had got here, she had dressed herself in the clothes she found in her closet and went looking for other signs of life just as Gabriella Montez had emerged from her room also looking for answers. Maddie was an employee from the Hotel Tipton in Boston, Massachusetts, and Gabriella was a math and science prodigy most recently from Albuquerque now attending Stanford University. They had never met each other before now, and yet, they both looked like someone from each other's lives. Neither of them knew why they had been brought here and left abandoned in this hotel, but they sure wanted to find out. Patting Alex on the back to comfort her tears of joy, Gabriella smelled the body odor in her clothes and winced a bit, but it was obvious she needed a friend right now.

"Who are you?" Maddie asked.

"Alex…." The de-powered sorceress answered with her voice heavy with emotion and turned to meet Maddie. "Alex Russo, New York City…" She took a deep breath and tried to apologize for scaring them. "I've been stuck in the place for five days without seeing anyone…. I was about to lose it…"

"Why didn't you call for a ride?" Gabriella asked.

"No phones…"

"You could have hitch-hiked out." Maddie responded while placing aside her cue stick.

"It's been snowing off and on since I got here." Alex looked at them expecting more answers. "There's a snowdrift five feet high against the main entrance, it's below zero outside and there is no one else in this hotel… well, except for you two so far."

"Then how did we get here?" Gabriella inquired.

"I was hoping you would have had that answer." Alex looked them both over sniffling and wiping tears from her eyes. Maddie and Gabriella looked at each other then looked to Alex with a mixture of confusion and worry.

"Let me get this straight…" Maddie seemingly took charge. "Someone abducts the three of us from three separate places, drugs us, transports us here and then just abandons us in this huge creepy hotel to fend for ourselves? That not only sounds preposterous, but it sounds incredibly unlikely. I mean, what would be the motive?"

"You got a better idea?" Alex folded her arms trying to hear the alternate theory. Maddie looked at Gabriella who almost spoke, but her scenario was not that much different.

"Why would anyone do that?" She asked.

"I don't know." Alex sighed thinking about it, but it did mean she could stop blaming her brothers for using magic on her. These girls had actually tried hitting her with cue sticks. They didn't try using spells to fight her. There was no way they could be wizards or witches so for the first time, she was unsure if magic was involved in their exile here.

"Maddie, I'm still hungry…" Gabriella spoke. "Can we talk over this while we eat?"

"Yeah… Alex, where's the…"

"Kitchen's this way…" Sniffling and blinking away her tears, Alex turned out of the room and led the way content for the first time to not be so alone. A light grin accompanied her face to find these girls here to keep her company.

"If someone did abduct us…" Gabriella was rationalizing the situation the same way she did her college studies. "Why the three of us? Why not grab three people from the same city? Why single us out from out of a million girls our age in Boston or New York City?"

"Good question…." Alex led the way to the lobby and the back employee corridor.

"It's a good question." Maddie followed Alex into the corridor. "Why were we picked, and why this place? What is it about this place? Where are we anyway? Boston, New York, Albuquerque?"

"Definitely not New Mexico…" Gabriella entered the kitchen and looked around the stainless steel surroundings of stoves and ovens. "New Mexico does not get snow storms. New York State or in-land Massachusetts, maybe. " She looked around once for the food and Alex showed them the full-stocked pantry. It was stacked ceiling high with boxes, containers, bins, sacks and shelves of dried and canned food. Every wall had something lining it. Bags of potatoes, onions, turnips and more were piled under one counter. Maddie strolled forward and realized it was slightly bigger than the pantry back home at the Hotel Tipton. Alex immediately reached up and took down a box of Hostess cupcakes she'd been eating for several days straight. There was umpteen cans of fruit and vegetables in large commercial canisters along the middle shelves, sacks of flour on pallets on the floor and baskets of smaller onions and potatoes. Numerous drink mixes filled some of the shelves. Large factory boxes of cereal and oatmeal were on the far end. It looked like a mini-general store before them. "At least, we're not going hungry…"

"No eggs?" Maddie looked at Alex.

"Cooler…" Alex pointed to five industrial refrigerators in a row outside the room. Skirting across the kitchen, Maddie opened them up to view what looked like a thousand eggs in commercial packaging layers the same that the Tipton got. There were also eight industrial five-gallon containers of milk along the bottom along with around twenty cans of soda Alex had stuck inside for drinking.

"Anyone want omelets?" She took down a cardboard tray. "Someone grab me a large frying pan…"

"It would have to be someone we know." Gabriella peeked into one of the large meat coolers and pulled out the bacon. "Whoa…" It too was also fully stocked. "Have you seen this?" She looked to Alex.

"Fifteen rib roasts, thirty ten-pound bags of hamburger, twelve turkeys, forty chickens, fifty sirloin steaks, two dozen pork roasts and twenty legs of ham." Alex quoted. "I've been trapped here for five days. I had the time." She handed Maddie the frying pan hanging from a rack off the ceiling.

"You were saying, Gabriella?" Maddie took the pan and the vegetable oil to cook the omelets.

"I'm saying it would have to be someone we all know…" The brainy beauty closed the freezer. "Someone who would have ties to this place and to us. Maddie, when we met, you said I looked like a friend of yours…"

"Corrie Willows…"

"And I said you looked like my friend, Sharpay…." Gabriella stood and posed a bit as Maddie cracked some eggs into a pan and added some grated cheese. "But how does Alex connect to us."

"Gwen!" Maddie suddenly flashed upon a face from a girl in her high school. "Gwen Alvarado! Alex, you look almost exactly like Gwen."

"Who's Gwen?" Alex inquired.

"She was this girl my friend Zack was in love with, but she instead fell for his brother, Cody." This had been annoying Maddie since she had seen Alex. Alex was taller and had more hair than Gwen, but she knew they looked like each other. "We each know someone who looks like us."

"Except me…" Alex was skeptical. "I've never met anyone who ever looked…." She suddenly froze upon looking at Maddie. Maddie looked like Samantha Danvers, the witch who nearly drowned her at the school gym at Tribeca Prep except her hair was not so bright and Maddie was thinner, not quite so curvy or busomy. "Samantha…"

"Two people who look like me?" Maddie scoffed. "Wow!"

"But that still doesn't make sense…" Alex watched as Maddie folded over the giant omelet in the pan then went to get three plates. "If someone is trapping here because we look like people we know, why isn't Sharpay, Corry, Gwen or Samantha here?" She rationalized as well, counting off the names with the fingers of her left hand. "I don't know anyone who looks like Gabriella, and besides, what kind of reason is it to abduct us? It still means someone else we all have in common has trapped us here… and even worse… could be watching us."

Maddie looked around first for hidden cameras then Gabriella. Maybe none of them were going to be showering and changing clothes in this place until they had scrutinized and searched their rooms for secret cameras.

"You had to say it." Maddie looked around after serving out the omelet she had cooked and turning off the stove. "You just had to say it."

"You think we're being watched?" Gabriella looked around trying to control her paranoia.

"I think it's possible…" Alex paused and gasped a second before speaking. She couldn't believe she was about to confess to this, but she felt the circumstances required it. "Guys, there's something else I need to tell you about me that I don't usually talk about, but it might be important. You see, I'm a…"

"Yes, people!" A raven-haired beauty with dark red to auburn hair and brown doe-like eyes entered the kitchen in their same white monogrammed attire. She was more bosomy than Alex but with not as much hair as she strided in excited and relieved not to be alone in this huge dark winter resort. "Finally… I knew if I kept following the voices I'd find you." She paused and beamed a harmless grin. "Hi, I'm Jessie Prescott…" She reached to shake Alex's hand. "Do any of you have a cell phone? I've got four kids in a penthouse that I'm responsible for, and I really got to call for a ride." She looked at their puzzled and confused faces.

"I have never seen this person before in my life!" Alex immediately confessed.


	4. Chapter 4

4

The new girl to their strange company was Jessie Prescott, just as she had announced herself. Born in Texas to Captain John Prescott of the Army's Fifth Regimental Battalion near Fort Hawthorne, she was admittedly a former Army brat and an only child. Upon seeing her, Maddie briefly flashed back to another girl she had once met, a farm girl from Kansas named Bailey Pickett who attended school with her friends, Cody and Zack Martin, but Jessie was much older and more vivacious. If she saw Bailey today, she'd be sure she'd look like Jessie, who was very concerned about her young charges, the adopted children of director Martin Ross and his actress-wife, Christina Ross. Upon hearing that Jessie was from New York City, Maddie and Gabriella had curiously and suspiciously turned to look at Alex and her abrupt effort to disavow knowing Jessie.

"It's a little suspicious, you think?" Maddie sat on the desk in the hotel manager's office as Gabriella tinkered with the radio. "The fact that they're both from New York City."

"It's a big city…" Gabriella had been there once with her boyfriend, Troy Bolton, to support her friend Sharpay in a Broadway play there. "Maybe they don't know each other."

"I don't know…" Maddie was skeptical. "I just can't help but wonder if Alex could be connected to whoever trapped us here." She paused. "How do we know she was here for five days before we arrived?"

"We don't…" Gabriella listened and searched the radio band signals for traffic. "But we have no reason to not believe her either." She took off the headphones she was wearing. "Look, this thing is definitely broadcasting, but it's snowing again and we don't know how far in the mountains we are. The phone lines may be down, and the storm could be disrupting the signal. Let's just leave it on and keep checking it. I mean, there has to be forest rangers or mountain patrols that check the area…"

"Another thing…" Maddie still tried to figure out this odd situation. "You've seen the snow outside. How possible is it that someone can get in and out of this hotel with you, myself and Jessie under Alex's nose, change our clothes, leave us in rooms and then get out again without any of us waking and seeing this person?"

"I'm a completely scientific and rational person." The cute and attractive Hispanic beauty responded analytically. "I can only respond to stuff I know, but if we can be drugged and brought in here without seeing our abductor, Alex can be too and we have to assume she's a victim along with us until we have evidence otherwise."

"You are so not Corrie…." Maddie compared Gabriella to one of her best friend's back in Boston. Corrie and Gabriella may have looked enough alike to be twins, but Corrie was much more spirited and effervescent. She was practically a big shy kid with a huge trusting heart. Gabriella also saw a distinct difference between Maddie and Sharpay. Maddie was smart and less assertive that the Broadway-bound blonde actress and that distinction helped them form a bond she never could have with Sharpay.

"At least we're in a warm place…" Gabriella remained optimistic.

"You still think we're somewhere in the Adirondacks?" Maddie asked and hopped off the desk as Gabriella departed through the door to the back corridor.

"My mom and I used to travel a lot…" The brunette prodigy confessed. "In the brief instance the snow stopped, I saw snow-topped granite mountains and fir and pine trees in the distance. We are either in the mountains of Lower New York, the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee or the Rocky Mountains of Central Colorado. I can get a better idea tonight when I check the constellations, but I'm going to say the Adirondacks since both Jessie and Alex are from Manhattan." She paused. "Of course, I could be a lot more sure if this place had an Internet connection." She drew quiet as if waiting for Maddie to respond. "My mom must be going crazy wondering where I am." She finally responded again.

"Yeah…" Maddie had the same thought. "My parents and grandma must be freaking out too." She turned into the kitchen and flipped the light on. "I'm putting a chicken in the oven. It should be ready by dinner. Why don't you go see how Alex and Jessie are doing?"

"Okay…" Gabriella looked at her and turned away to stride down the length of the hall for the lounge area in the far end of the hotel. It seemed a much more hospitable place that the Gold Ballroom on the other side of the lobby plus it had windows and was not nearly as creepy or scary as the ballroom. In the kitchen area, Maddie noticed the chicken she had left to thaw out at breakfast on the wooden table and lifted it up by the pan. The plastic cover slipped off it much easier now. Filling a metal measuring cup with water, she added it to the bottom of the pan then turned to slide it into the oven.

She heard a loud ding from the room.

Turning around, she looked at the oven and around the room. She didn't recall setting the timer on it. She just recalled saying she wanted chicken, and the girls offering to help her cook it. Gabriella had cut the potatoes and carrots to go with it and had left them sitting in the strainer in the sink. Pouring them out into the pan around the chicken, Maddie started wishing she had Chef Paollo from the Tipton to advise her on how to prepare it. Roasted chicken was fine, but she thought it required some seasoning.

That loud ding sounded again.

More curious than spooked, Maddie looked up again to the white and light blue room with all the stainless steel shelves, stoves, ovens and counters. There were just too many places to hide in here. Had Jessie or Alex been playing with one of the timers on the stoves in here and left it to spook her? Shoving the chicken into the pre-heated stove, Maddie looked into her peripheral vision once more then closed the oven and increased the temperature a bit. She didn't consider herself much of a chef, but she had helped her mother quite often at home when she wasn't fending for herself. A light sigh from her lips, and she turned to head out between the kitchen manager's office and the two cold storage rooms for the employee corridor. As she neared the bathrooms, she heard the ding again.

That time, she knew exactly where it had come from. Stopping where she was, she turned and peered inquiringly into the lobby. It sounded like the bell for the bellboys back at the Tipton. This bell for this place was right in direct sight of her on the counter of the admitting area. Someone was trying to scare her.

"Gabriella…" Maddie spoke matter-of-factly. "Are you trying to scare me?" She grinned thinking about clever it was and how close she had come to be scared. "Come on out…" Maddie lifted the flip-top lid of the counter to the employee staff work area behind the counter and looked behind the counter expecting to find Gabriella hiding, but it was empty. No one was there.

Standing there, she wondered if she could be wrong. No one was in the concierge's office either. Slowly getting that creepy feeling back, Maddie slowly slipped back out and headed back toward the restrooms beyond the phone booths trying to pass off the sounds as a figment of her imagination. Maybe it was something else, but she didn't think so. She had been the Tipton Hotel candy girl for almost eight years, and she had heard hotel manager Marion Moseby hit that bell hundreds if not thousands of times. She knew that type of bell several times over. As she stepped into the corridor again, she heard it again and her heart jumped a beat. Something she couldn't see was hitting that bell! She knew it, and her feet tore down the corridor as fast as she could run. The soles of her white loafers made a rhythmic pattering sound under her feet against the polished concrete floor. Her breath raced from her lips, and her terrified heart pounded as she pushed through the wooden doors from the hall into the lounge. Her eyes glanced around for the others.

"Alex! Gabriella?" She scanned the room over from the chairs and sofas. "Jessie?" She looked at the fireplace. Alex had wanted to light the fireplace, but they didn't have any firewood, and it was so bitterly cold and icy outside no one wanted to walk into the trees to gather branches to burn. She then recalled Alex claiming she had moved a television set from the lobby to her room along with almost a dozen bags of snacks from the kitchen. Maybe that's where they were. Still fighting the creepy feeling in the back of her head, Maddie crossed the back of the room and took the stairs to the second floor. There was another smaller fireplace up here and a small table set with chairs. She had not explored the far end of the hotel yet, but she wasn't in any hurry to do so. She turned left a bit casually from the balcony into the hall down from Alex's suite and treaded the intricate pattern in the carpet to join them. When she passed the empty hall, she saw two new faces she'd never seen before. They were two young girls in blue dresses. Wide faces, round vacant staring eyes, slender arms holding each other by the hands and white socks with side buckled-shoes. That strange creepy feeling in Maddie's head was so loud she felt it was screaming.

"Hello, Maddie…" The two girls spoke at the same time. "Come play with us…" Their voices had a creepy British accent in their voices as well as a weird otherworldly undercurrent in them. Maddie backed away from them feeling her heart pounding faster and faster about to explode in her chest.

"We can play forever….

"And ever…

"And ever."

Unable to scream, Maddie turned making a short guttural noise from her throat. She wanted to scream, but she couldn't. Her body couldn't make the noise. She actually found herself racing past Alex's suite and down the hall to her room on the other end of the other upstairs balcony over the lounge. Her eyes were rounded in fear, her breath coming in short terrified bursts, she ran past Gabriella's room in 248 for her room on the back of the hotel in 250. Jumping on her door, she pulled it open and rushed inside. She had a small room with a small bathroom and a balcony over the back of the hotel with the same room of the lounge, but she did not want to be alone. Locking her door behind her, she turned and looked at the door, but in this small room, she felt the walls might be coming in on her. In fact, she felt she was being watched. She checked her closet and then the bathroom. There was no one in the room, but she didn't feel safe here. She wanted to be with the others. Why did she run past Alex's door?! She debated heading back out for what felt like several minutes, scared and terrified to be both alone and hesitant to go out again then fought her fears to risk it. One minute too scared to open the door to the hallway, she forced herself to open the door and take the balcony shortcut outside her room for Alex's suite. Springing from her room as a terrified jack-in-the-box, a stifled scream still in her chest, she rounded the corner and plowed straight into a person who she barely saw until the last minute.

"Are you okay?" It was another girl. Dressed in the same white sweater and slacks, she looked about her age. She had long straight black hair and two warm brown colored eyes on a round kewpie-doll like face atop a very full-figured frame. "I'm sorry…" She tried reaching to Maddie to lift her from the floor. "I didn't mean to…"

"Don't touch me!" Maddie rolled over and lifted herself to her feet.

"Oh, okay…"

"Don't touch me!" Maddie had tears in her frightened eyes as she slid along the wall unsure who this girl was and what she wanted. She wanted to find Alex and Gabriella. Tearing down the hallway, she turned right down the hallway and smashed into the doors on Room 237. It was locked from the inside, but there was voices and laughter inside. Maddie pounded at the door while looking left and right down the hall.

"Alex! Open up!" She pounded and fought with the door. "Open up!"

"Maddie?" Alex opened the door and let her inside. Laughing and grinning one minute, Jessie and Gabriella looked up from the sofa and potato chip covered coffee table a bit confused as Maddie hugged Alex crying and shaking. The brunette sorceress looked confused, but the girls realized Maddie had been scared badly and rallied to her side. Jessie handed her a cold soda from the mini-bar in the room.

"Maddie? What is it?" Jessie asked her.

"Two girls…" Maddie was helped to the sofa as Gabriella patted and rubbed her back. "Maybe three… two creepy little girls in powder blue dresses…"

Alex reacted and looked away covertly.

"I don't think they were real…" Maddie shuddered with fear and broke down crying terrified for her life. She had been scared in her life, but there was a difference between surprised and truly scared. You could forget being surprised, but getting scared meant not being able to forget the fear and panic of looking into something that defied rational thought. Alex stood over her as Maddie sipped her soda and leaned into Gabriella for support.

"You saw them too?" Alex's voice quivered. "I thought for sure I had hallucinated them…"

"Them?" Jessie stood before her. "Alex, what are you not telling us?"

"Guys…" Alex cleared her throat unsure of what was happening, but she did know one thing. "I think the hotel is haunted…"


	5. Chapter 5

5

She did not recognize this room. Rising tiredly and exhaustedly, Sonny Munroe woke drained of energy and still half asleep in a large double bed in a basic hotel room apartment looking out to a dining area separated from her room by a half-closed curtain in an archway and another far bedroom. The mirror on the bureau in the room reflected her sleepy face on her as she widened her eyes a bit more trying to break the sleep from her face. This room was fair, a little homey with a glass door closet, a door from her bedroom to the hall and another door into her bathroom. It was not the first time she had woke up in a strange hotel. Since she had left the TV show "So Random," she had been on a coast-to-coast American tour from New York to Los Angeles, and her mother acting as her manager was often having security escort or carry her to bed and put her to sleep, but this was the first time she had been allowed to sleep late in what seemed like days. It was also the first time her mother had dressed her in a long sheer nightgown that turned invisible when she stood in the light.

"Mom," She called out. "When's my interview with Conan O'Brien?" She called out and wandered into the bathroom. She found a strange toothbrush and toothpaste. It was definitely not her own, but she was not going out without brushing her teeth. The bathroom had a small closed plate glass window over the toilet partially filled with snow and when she opened it for the fresh air, a blast of cold air hit her hard and froze her so fast she might as well have been in the Arctic. Burbank seemed so much colder than she recalled.

"Mom, can you hear me?" Sonny called out again with her toothbrush in hand about to brush her teeth. No response. There was no sign of a clock in the bathroom, but the alarm clock by the bed read 10:43. For some reason, it felt much later than that. Logic dictated her mother was possibly down getting breakfast, but that didn't make sense since they always had breakfast brought to the room before going over their day's schedule. Nothing about this morning felt right. Most of the time she was up at five or six in the morning and racing off to a photo shoot or to the local auditorium to prepare for her concerts. After three minutes of brushing her teeth and an eight-minute shower, she was wrapped in a towel and walking out to get dressed, but when she opened the closet, she failed to find her wardrobe and suitcases in the closet. On metal hangars down the rod were a row of over twenty-five white long-sleeved shirts and sweaters with accompanying white slacks. Her big brown eyes blinked a bit confused, and her slender lips parted in disbelief.

"Where are my clothes?" She asked herself then checked the bureau. One top drawer was full of rows of white socks neatly folded and placed in the drawer in squares. The next drawer was fill of full of a jungle of bras and underwear. Next drawer, white t-shirts… next drawer, white sweat pants… Everything was white...

"You've got to be kidding me?!" Her nervous tension and frustration built up to a fevered pitch. When her eyes looked up, her gaze fell on something in the mirror. It was a word painted in a child's handwriting on the bathroom door behind her, but when she looked back, the bathroom door was still open just as she had left it. When she looked back into the mirror, the door was open. It had to have been an optical illusion; it had happened so fast that she didn't even see what the word was. Sighing and fretting, she thought back to Nashville when her crew misplaced part of the sound gear and then to Denver when her bus arrived late for a radio interview and she had to do it by phone. She couldn't even find her cell phone now plus it looked like her clothes were now missing. Stuck with the ivory white attire with the monogrammed shirts, Sonny tried to make the best of it and dressed in what her mother had left for her. The one phone in the room might as well be a prop because she couldn't get a signal on it. Ready to start screaming, the statuesque beauty tossed her long dark locks back after dressing in what she had and realized she'd have to face staff and locals unprepared as she went off to find her mother and assistant. The other room in the far end of her quarters was vacant. More suited for a child, the single bed in it looked as if it hadn't even been slept in. Descending down a few steps to the door to the pastel blue hallway, Sonny stepped out into a hallway adjacent landing near a bright tan painted stairwell and railing. The walls were pale blue in color, the carpet a deep azure blue in color. Crossing over to the room across from her, Sonny rapped lightly on the door looking for her personal assistant.

"Marcie?" She knocked and checked the room. The door was unlocked, but the room was far less simple than her own. A double bed, bureau, table, writing desk and small TV mounted to the wall with a wintry landscape painting over the bed and a wide mirror on the wall near the bathroom door. Sonny heard the tapping of feet coming down the stairs behind her and turned her head over to the stairwell.

Garbed in two light blue matching dresses, two brown-haired girls holding each other's hands came strolling down from the top floor from the stairs. They weren't scary nor intimidating, but Sonny beamed to them passing by her. Strolling forward to her and looking up to her in unison with two mournful round brown eyes, they glided past the corner of the railing and the bench in front of it then broke gaze with her to stroll down the steps to head downstairs. They were quiet and surreal little angels dressed for another time, but then that's possibly how their mother dressed them. When Sonny looked down at them, they somehow knew she was looking at them, paused to look up at her then wandered out of the way of Sonny's eye line and vanished.

"Wait a minute…" Sonny came around and ambled down the twisting staircase to the first floor and emerged on to a larger hotel corridor lined with occasional benches and tables and decorated with Native American blankets and objects. The carpet was obtuse with red, orange and brown patterns and the walls ivory white with the far wall filled with dozens of black and white photos of a time before her own. Nearing the end, she noticed the girls a bit further away from her and casually strolling away from her.

"Excuse me?" She called to them disappearing from her. "I'm a bit lost, could you girls help me? Can you help me find the…

…lobby?" She turned the corner and found herself alone in the hall separated from the room she was looking for by several interior wood doors with paneled glass. Peeking through, Sonny looked up and noticed a dimly lit lobby of columns, chairs, seats and sofas stretching almost thirty feet with the hotel admission desk down the left side of the room. The middle of the room stretching to the far end was left open for traffic, but during the busy season, this place must have been full of people, travelers and guests. The first sitting area by the first entry was occupied by a number of girls talking and discussing something at the moment she was not aware she would be a part of yet. All dressed in the same limited similar white attire they had been left, they looked like agents employed by a single company or coven and appeared as if they were eating breakfast from a cart left adjacent to them. Sonny noticed the attire left for her matched their clothes, but the five drew quiet and watched her surreal arrival with distant stunned curiosity. The scent of baked chicken filled the lobby, but the five attractive young ladies stopped talking when she appeared and watched curiously ambivalent as Sonny strided up to the hotel counter, looked over it and then strolled up to meet them.

"When does the desk clerk get back?" She asked.

"We don't know." Jessie answered and sipped from a can of juice. Placing her plastic plate empty with her fork on it to the table before her, Gabriella had hopped up and whispered something in Maddie's ear. Upon recognizing Sonny and telling Maddie who she was, they began sitting up straight and grinning to be near a celebrity.

"Oh…" Sonny looked around the lobby and realized it seemed deserted. "How about two little girls? Did you see them?"

"Oh crap…" Alex had been standing and leaning on the pillar annoyed and nearing another stress-filled fit. The fifth girl to this unplanned and demented stranded list of forced hotel guests was Kat Harvey, the daughter of psychologist and paranormal consultant James Harvey. A deep exasperated sigh from her lungs, she looked around the faces of her band of abandoned hotel colleagues and rolled her eyes still trying to understand their extremely odd predicament.

"I'm looking for my mother." Sonny revealed. "Has anyone seen her?" She noticed something else. "Why are we all wearing the same clothes?" She noticed their matching white sweaters and slacks.

"Someone else want to tell this story?" Alex spoke up. "I'm getting tired of repeating it."

"I've got it." Maddie set her plate out of her lap and hopped up grinning as Jessie and Gabriella shared her awe of meeting Sonny. "You're Sonny Munroe, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am…" Sonny grinned a bit like the small town girl demeanor she really had to encounter someone being star-struck with her TV actress turned pop star status and watched Maddie hopping around briefly a bit excitedly.

"I don't know how you're going to like this, but…" Maddie finally continued and looked over her new friends. "We're kind of snowbound here…"

"We are?" Sonny looked over their variety of faces. "Kind of early in the year for snow, isn't it?"

"Not for the Adirondacks…" Gabriella lifted her eyes a bit eagerly. "You see, in the higher elevations as we get higher in the atmosphere…"

"Now is not the time for a science lesson…" Jessie rolled her eyes at her.

"Snowbound?" Sonny looked from Maddie to Alex and back to Maddie. "We got phones right?"

"No phones, no outside contact…" Kat shifted in her chair. "We're like Survivor except with all the comforts of a five-star hotel haunted by the ghosts of two creepy little girls."

"What?" Sonny reacted confused. "But I've got a concert on Friday…"

"Looks like you're going to miss it." Alex mumbled.

"But… but…" Sonny didn't understand this at all…"Someone knows we're here."

"We haven't exactly confirmed that yet." Jessie spoke.

"It also doesn't really tell us where we are…" Maddie spoke. "Or how far we are from the nearest city."

"It's the Hotel Overlook." Kat replied casually. The girls looked at her as if she had just confessed to murder. How could she know that so fast when they had been here a week and found barely anything with the name of the hotel on it. Jessie looked at the "H" and "O" letters on her sweater and on Kat and Gabriella's outfits and realized the connection.

"How do you know that?" Maddie asked.

"My dad's a paranormal investigator." Kat announced proudly of the fact. "He wrote about this place, and I recognized the room from photos in a National Geographic. We are currently twenty-five miles over land from Sidewinder near the Rocky Mountains State Park in Larimer County, Colorado, and the road is so treacherous in the winter that it closes down between Early November until Late April." Kat lifted her up her plate up to her face from the table by her, pecked at her chicken and broccoli with her fork and slipped it into her mouth.

"We're stuck here until April? Left here by some practical joker with too much time on his hands?" Jessie tilted her head forward and leaned back defeatedly in her chair.

"What?!" Sonny reacted and looked to Alex. "How is this possible?"

"Around here, nothing's impossible." Alex mumbled out loud.

"Kat…" Gabriella shifted their group's attention to the fifth member of their retinue. "What else do you know about this place?"

"Well…" Kat stood and looked at the snow piled up against the window up to her chest. "The hotel was built in the Late 1800s on what was reportedly Native American burial ground, and I think a few Indian skirmishes might have even been fought here during the construction. It was built to be a stopping place for the rich traveling from east to west and at one time, it fell into the possession of the mob. A number of murders are said to have occurred here." She paused. Sonny had sat down near Jessie, and Alex finally took the empty seat across from Maddie.

"During the Fifties, it was used as a boarding school... very briefly..." Kat volunteered the history openly and clearly as if she were telling a fireside ghost story. "But in the Sixties, it was reopened after a period of neglect, but by this time, it wasn't becoming cost efficient to keep the hotel and the road to it open over the winter, and they began closing it. The owners started hiring a number of caretakers to run the hotel during the off-season, and that's when the worst part of the hotel's history gets the most gory. Around 1970, the hotel hired a man to live in the hotel with his family to maintain it over the winter, but the isolation must have got to him because he went nuts, killed his family then blasted his own head open with a rifle."

"Oh..." Maddie placed her hand to her mouth a bit sick.

"This is why I hate ghost stories." Jessie looked around their circle of faces. "They always go too far!"

"Not all ghost stories go toward the gory..." Kat had worked enough with her father on investigations to know the field almost as well as him. "A few years later, another caretaker here went crazy and attacked his family with a polo mallet, but the hotel chef..." She paused trying to think. "I think his name was Torrance, but I think that's actually the name of the family... the chef came by to check on the boy the couple had just before getting bludgeoned by the father within an inch of his life. The whole story was so gratuitous that the hotel closed down for a while and a movie was made on it with Jack Nicholson... It reopened a few years later... monitored this time in Sidewinder by computer."

"I bet we could get a signal we're here if we shut down the AC and the boilers." Gabriella looked up.

"Wouldn't we freeze to death before anyone could get here?" Jessie looked to at her. "Girls…" She tapped the front double pane glass of the lobby keeping the hotel warm from the five feet of snow out front. "That is not cotton candy out there."

"Wait a second..." Sonny reacted both annoyed and incredulous at this morbid history. "What I'm hearing is that I'm trapped with you girls in this spooky hotel where a history of caretakers have gone nuts, and we can't leave?" She scanned their apathetic faces.

"Oh, but that's not the best part…" Alex responded by shifting in her seat and lifting her head over to Sonny. "Don't forget… we're also trapped here with the ghosts of two demented little girls in blue dresses and possibly others still lurking about…." She looked over to Kat. "I think that's the best part." She responded sarcastically.

"I don't believe in ghosts." Gabriella announced.

"You will…"

"You know…" Gabriella sat up straight. "This could all be just one sociological experiment. Six random subjects in a highly subjective environment to read and study our reactions to a variety of…"

"In the middle of my concert tour?" Sonny reacted.

"I was taken from my bed in a Manhattan penthouse where I was in charge of the four Ross children." Jessie spoke. "Have we completely glossed over the fact that we have been kidnapped and dumped here? Oh, and let's not forget… I'm pretty sure if I was going to undertake an experiment with several strangers that I would have to sign some sort of, oh, I don't know, waiver or contract…"

"She does make a point." Maddie agreed with her.

"Look, what do we know here?" Gabriella rose and took the floor. "One, we are snowbound in a large luxury hotel with plenty of food and resources to live comfortably here for six months…"

"Six months is a ridiculous amount of time to trap us here for a social experiment in supernatural paranoia." Maddie spoke up.

"Alleged supernatural activity." Gabriella corrected her. "Two, whoever brought us here for whatever reason is able to freely traffic here, drop us off and then get out unseen…"

"Someone is going to be looking for me!" Sonny reminded them.

"And me!" Jessie insisted.

"We've all got families and people who are going to be looking for us." Gabriella added. "Three, Sonny, you and Kat are the most recent to arrive here. We have to presume that someone will be coming here to dump off others with us after you just as Maddie and I were left here after Alex had been here a while."

Alex silently lowered her head into her hand resting on her elbow on the arm of the chair and stared into nothing.

"That sounds logical." Maddie realized what she was saying.

"I say we stay up a night and watch the road up to the hotel." Gabriella took charge with a plan. "We can do it in shifts of a few hours each. We've got this whole hotel to move around in and look for anyone arriving here by cover of darkness."

"It would have to be a snowplow." Maddie proved she could be smart. "A helicopter coming up and down the mountain would make too much noise." She looked to Alex sitting with her back to the admission desk. She had been oddly distracted through most of the discussion as if something was bothering her.

"If I had my magic, I could get everyone out now." The Waverly Place princess told herself in her head. Gabriella's proposal sounded clear, but she didn't think it was going to be that easy or that simple. Whoever had placed her here had known enough to take her wand and turn off her magic abilities, and that required someone with mystical powers from the magic community. A mere mortal practical joker would not be able to trap her so easy as they were proposing. Something else had to be at work here, someone who knew about magic.

"I'm a wizard." Alex imagined herself confessing, but then she could also imagine the girls believing her just as well as them attacking her, gagging her and trapping her in a closet for sounding crazy. She debated more internally over whether she should tell. She had almost told them before just as Jessie showed up, and she was still debating inside her head whether to go ahead and tell them, but then a cold chill danced behind her and the hairs on the back of her neck started sticking straight up on her. Gabriella was a few windows away and trying to describe the layout of the grounds that she had seen from the third floor. Several feet away in the darkened access hallway to the Gold Ballroom, Alex saw the ghosts of the two young girls again standing and watching. They noticed Alex and then looked at each other… then silently turning away to vanish behind the hallway beyond the stairs to the second floor.


	6. Chapter 6

6

"Maddie… Maddie…"

"Yes, Mr. Moseby…" Maddie jerked awake at the candy counter of the five-star posh lobby of the Tipton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. It was among the top five hotels in the city, frequented by ambassadors, politicians, famous celebs and captains of industry. Ronald Reagan had once stayed here. So did Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Thomas Edison. Almost everyone famous from Errol Flynn to Katy Perry had once stayed here. It was a twenty-five-story luxury hotel owned by Wilfred Tipton, the owner and chief stockholder of Tipton Enterprises. The place was built to resemble the palatial castles of England with a sunken lobby and a huge crystal chandelier to meet guests. The furnishings were gold and polished mahogany with only the very best museum level pieces to greet guests and an elderly doorman who tipped his had to guests as they entered. The carpeting was a bold yellow tan with a sitting area where guests comfortably sat and relaxed with a newspaper or a quick smoke. A British businessman sealed a deal with his German and American counterparts near the elevator as Maddie lifted her head and looked around. Blinking her eyes tiredly, she hoped Mr. Moseby didn't notice her dozing, but she had no idea why she was so tired. It was as if she'd been awake for a hundred years.

"Maddie!" He slammed his hand palm down on her counter.

"Yes, Mr. Moseby!" She jerked her head up with her brown eyes stretched open wide to fight her fatigue. Her boss was a short thin African American man with a shaved head. Dressed in the hotel's blue blazer and light blue slacks with a pale powder blue tie, he looked at her with a perplexed looked and thin confused grimace on his thin lips. If he ever smiled, he might have looked like Stymie of the "Our Gang" shorts.

"Madelyne…" He spoke like a frustrated boss with his mind on a million details. "Mr. Collins in 613 would like a basket of candy in his room."

"Mr. Collins, sir?"

"Yes…" Moseby confirmed it. "Get a basket ready and take it up to him." He turned and hastened back to the check-in area. Maddie looked down upon her hotel uniform. She had not worn this blue shirt and red skirt in almost five years since Mr. Moseby left the hotel to run the accommodations on the SS Tipton. The new manager, Stacy Orpington, had even made her an assistant manager with a blue blazer and white uniform to wear while she was still employed. She had to be dreaming. It had been years since she had been the hotel candy girl, but she played along with the scenario. Without looking, she picked up a basket of chocolate bars and black licorice to take upstairs, it was Mr. Collins' preferred choice, and walked into the elevator in her dream state and out of it almost instantaneously, finding herself much quicker as usual in this dream setting on the sixth floor that now looked oddly familiar. The walls were a crisp white; the carpet was Native American pattern of red, brown, orange and green. This was a far cry from the warm gold and blue colors of the Tipton. The red doors of the elevator chimed close behind as she lifted her eyes to realize she wasn't alone.

"Hello Maddie…" The two twin brunette girls looked up at her. It was not seeing that which woke her up, it was the scream, and somehow, Maddie realized it was her screaming she had heard. It sounded as if someone was bludgeoning her to death. Her heart pounding, her breath racing, the young girl inside her was too terrified to go back to sleep. Sitting in the light blue glow of the window, Gabriella looked over to her from watching the road going past the front entry. The snow had stopped, but the sky was still overcast. The moon on the other side illuminated the clouds and spread its glow over the white blanket of snow stretching around the hotel. Wrapped in a blanket on the windowsill, the lovely young science prodigy looked astutely upon Maddie and lifted her head up with the poise of a British princess.

"Bad dream?" She inquired lightly.

"Odd dream is more like it." Maddie gasped and swung her legs over the end of her bed. This wasn't her original room in the place, but it did have two beds for both her and Gabriella and it was closer to the lobby and the downstairs kitchen. Unlike her room, the closet was not full of clothes to wear during her stay, but the bathroom did have a large round tub to soak in, not that she really wanted to take a bath in a haunted hotel where she was jumping and reacting to every noise in the place.

"I noticed you was dreaming." Gabriella added matter-of-factly. "You were deep into REM sleep. I could hear your breath get quicker." She paused. "How have you been sleeping?"

"Not good…" Maddie confessed. "It is kind of hard to sleep when you might be part of some secret social experiment into the paranormal."

"Maybe… I'm not so sure. Come look at this." She gestured to Maddie by furling and unfurling her arm toward her. Awkwardly ambling toward her on her tired legs, Maddie turned her back to the window and hopped up on to the sill where she could look down on the front entrance, the outside topiary and then the hedge maze a few yards out and across from the front driveway.

"What do you see?"

"It's what I don't see…" Gabriella's analytical brain was at it again. "Do you notice it?"

"What?"

"The snow is completely undisturbed in the driveway." Gabriella revealed. "If someone was driving the twenty-five miles from town, we should be seeing disturbed snow in the driveway. Even with fresh snow falling, any new snow would be piling over the disturbed snow pushed up and piled up by a snowplow coming up the mountain. The tracks from a vehicle would still be perceivable."

"Maybe they're coming around the back way through the supply dock." Maddie compared the way the Overlook was run to the day-to-day operations of the Hotel Tipton.

"That's entirely possible…" Gabriella thought about it. The light from one lamp on in the room made her looks as equally ethereal and phantom-like as the alleged spirit guests of the hotel. "But let's analyze this. Let's say someone was for some reason drugging young girls and abandoning them in a deserted hotel with more than adequate supplies to live by themselves as part of some experiment. Ignoring the motivations to do such a thing, this person would have to somehow drug his target in her presence or with a delayed narcotic while still being able to reach her and secretly spirit her out of her home or location."

"Sounds fishy to start with…" Maddie rubbed her eyes trying to stay awake. "How would he be able to avoid getting caught?"

"By drugging their family and associates." Gabriella answered.

"But Sonny was taken from a hotel from under her mother, security guard and assistants." Maddie realized. "They were all drugged?"

"Or gassed." Gabriella felt as if she could be a mystery writer as good as author Temperance Brennan. "Gases dissipate slowly in the bloodstream, but we could have been drugged several times during transport. If that was the case, don't you think we should have some memory of waking up while we were being transported over state lines and into a vehicle capable of navigating treacherous mountain roads in the middle of winter?"

Maddie didn't know how to respond to that query.

"Now let's say our abductor has successfully left one girl here, Alex, and does return five days later not just with one girl but with three and two of them are from entirely different cities in different parts of the country."

"It would have to be more than one person." Maddie was picking up on her line of reasoning.

"What assurance do these people have that they can slip in and out to leave not just one girl but two more girls two days later and still not be discovered by the first four girls on their next arrival?" Gabriella pointed out the one odd flaw in their theory. "How would they be getting in? Through the front entrance which has the most direct route to the upstairs rooms but a high factor of being discovered or through the loading dock which has the worst access to the rooms and the least possibility of getting discovered?"

"Maybe there's an underground way in through the grounds or…" Maddie realized the possible truth. "They're gassing us each night that they're coming."

"Maybe these hauntings we're experiencing aren't ghosts, but hallucinatory effects from the gas." Gabriella rationalized. "It could explain the bad dreams too."

"Another thing…" Maddie realized the biggest hindrance to this scenario. "Why were we singled out? None of us knew each other before today, and besides knowing people who look like each other, we don't have anything in common. We have to have someone in common. Someone who knows us and has enough details on our lives to successfully take us from our homes." She paused to glance down over the front of the hotel. "However, none of this explains why we're not finding disturbed snow from vehicles arriving under the new blankets of snow." Maddie looked outside the window. There was not a light burning on the grounds or from the hotel. It was just light blue to dark gray snow all around then and a gull bright sky overhead with a bright spot hiding the moon overhead. A few snowflakes started falling again, and Gabriella slid off the windowsill to pour herself some more coffee from the thermos taken from the kitchen. Screwing off the cup from the top of the thermos, she set it by the lamp and then screwed off the smaller cap from inside of it, tipping the thermos over to fill the cup part with coffee to keep her awake, but she didn't get very much. It was just enough to cover the bottom.

"How are they getting us here?!" Maddie asked out loud and looked to Gabriella jostling the thermos. "Out of coffee?" She asked.

"Yeah…" Gabriella looked up to her. "Will you be okay as I run to the kitchen and fill it up?"

"I guess…" Maddie shuddered not wanting to be alone, but she also didn't want to be wandering the hotel in the dark. "Lock the door on the way out…" She took her turn on guard at the window.

"I'll be back as fast as I can…" Gabriella promised and unlocked the door, slipping through it and locking it again as she closed it, carrying the thermos close to her chest as she moved through the vast hotel interior. This part of the hotel wasn't much different than the hallway on the second floor over the lounge area at the far end of the hotel. Same white walls with the same dark brown doors and Native American carpet. The hall turned toward the elevator down to the lobby but down a bit more was the employee access area to the employee corridor behind the admissions area and the manager's office. It was a more direct route to get where she was going without passing through the dark lobby, and it was illuminated by more lights along the way, but the second she reached the stairs over the corridor, Gabriella heard the humming electric neon lights go off and on again. Could the snow be affecting the power? Partway down it happened again, bathing her in pitch darkness except for the emergency lights for a few seconds before coming back on. Once they came back on, she hastened her steps to the bottom and made a hairpin turn to the employee corridor on the first floor.

That had been kind of an unnerving experience, but it hadn't scared her. As she turned for the kitchen, she heard something else. She heard an uneven rhythmic pattern going on the atmosphere of the place. It sounded like music, but not just regular music, but old big band music like what Miss Arbus had played for her and her friends in school as an example of music from before their time, but who would be playing music this time of night? To her ears, it seemed to be coming from the Gold Ballroom behind her. Not really interested in leaving Maddie upstairs any longer than she had to be, her over-powering curiosity was imploring her to go check it out. Leaving the thermos on the counter by her, she tilted her head a bit perplexed and headed down further to check out the sounds. It was not just music, it sounded like a lot of voices… a lot of voices talking in levels over each other. She could hear glasses clinking, men laughing and women partying. It sounded as if there was a band playing the post-World War Two music of the Thirties and Forties and when it finished on the loud tones of the trumpet, it sounded as if there was over a hundred people cheering and applauding.

Lifting her head to peek into the room, Gabriella saw the room full of men and women dressed up in the richest attire. Where did these people come from? There had to be almost two hundred people in period apparel; the men were all in suits; the women in every sort of fantastic dress they could wear. Their looks resembled the black and white photos of this place…. men with hair slicked back, women wearing spectacular hair ornaments and wearing red lipstick with powdered faces, all laughing or drinking and celebrating what was once the Big Band era. The room was alive with activity with excited partygoers and cheering patrons of the arts. Clapping and applauding, they stood with their faces directed toward their host accepting their loud accolades and bravados. Dressed in a black tuxedo and tails, Troy Bolton grinned to his fans from the stage area then noticed Gabriella standing in the doors to the kitchen area and extended his hand to her to come join him. He looked more handsome than he had ever looked. His brown hair was combed back, his big blue eyes beaming to her with a broad grin on his steely jaw. He gestured to her more and more and the room called on Gabriella to join them. The clapping and applause was getting louder and she started to turn away only to be stopped by guests tugging her back in to join the party. Troy's hand took her left hand in his and tugged her on stage where the young girl looked around as a terrified waif before all these strangers in Roaring Twenties Big Band attire. She was dressed too casually from her time; she felt too out of place for these 1920s enthusiasts. Troy tenderly stroked her chin to face him.

"Remember our song?" He reminded her and began singing it. "_Living in my own world_…" He looked toward her very much in love with her. "_I didn't understand… that anything could happen when you take a chance_…" Their phantom audience began applauding and cheering at the sound of his voice. It was as if they wanted the chance to hear the modern music.

"_I never believed in_…" Gabriella started confused and terrified as the room applauded and cheered her decision even louder to give in to the party. "_What I couldn't see… I never opened my heart to all the possibilities_." Feeling safe near him, she couldn't stop looking at him. He was here. He was real, and they were together in this hotel.

"_I know that something has changed_." Their voices united in harmony and eyes joined before a band in white suits in a room illuminated in bright lights. "_Never felt this way, and right here tonight… This could be the start of something new… It feels so right to be here with you_..." Gabriella's heart went all aflutter as she turned around Troy and glanced briefly to her admirers watching her, but what she now saw petrified her down to the core of her soul. Instead of a room of people, she was staring at a room of skeletons in old suits, dusty dresses and cobwebbed poses, some of them perched in chairs or lurched over tables with skeletal-skull-faced waiters frozen in place standing among them carrying trays with glasses. It was a room of the dead, cold and dark and covered in blankets of dusty spider webs. Dozens of skulls and eyeless facing staring up at her from the seats and chairs, they resembled a forgotten army of undead within the tomb of an ancient Mayan pyramid opened for the very first time. Her voice erupted from her lungs in one loud scream and without even trying she found herself charging from the room on her two feet out the back way of the room without even looking behind her. Her eyes open wide, her teeth clenched in shock, she screamed again and went crashing over carts with drink containers on them and stumbling over chairs stacked in storage.

Hearing the screams, Alex and Sonny came running out of the brightly lit kitchen and looked left and right up and down the corridor, watching Gabriella franticly trying to break into the manager's office then trying to get into another room. They finally caught her about to break through to the front lobby area and pulled her back. She looked at them and screamed unable to recognize them. Hysterical, terrified and lost in her head, she fought with them briefly as they tried to get her into the kitchen prep area.

"Gabriella!" Sonny tried holding her, but she was fighting to get free from her. "Gabriella!" The East High alum was trying to crawl out of the room trying to escape. Neither of them could hold her.

"Gabriella!" Thrashing around about the floor trying to hold the frantic girl, Alex grabbed her and forced her arms around her, holding her in a forced hug around the shoulders. When she did that, Sonny noticed a foot long wooden staff like a magician's wand fall off of Alex and go skidding under the table. Ignoring it for the minute, Sonny realized Alex had calmed their hysterical roommate and the petite beauty gasped for air and broke down crying.

"We're here." Alex's soothing words comforted her. "We're here…"

At the end of the Overlook peering off the end of the hotel and the bottom of the hill from an unlocked second floor room, Kathleen "Kat" Harvey waited for Alex to return to the room and replace her on watch that she could go to sleep. Gabriella's reasoning of how they had been abducted and deserted here sounded logical, but when she poured over it mentally, the thirty-three year old interior decorator and part-time paranormal investigator somehow felt there was a paranormal factor in it they were overlooking. Maybe she had been to too many haunted houses and was starting to see ghosts and spirits in everything, but then this place was often described by other investigators as something as an entity. What was it that William Collins, the novelist and researcher, said about this place? He called the hotel "a magnet for the strange and psychotic," an allusion to the woman who came here to take her life here for no apparent reason in 1975. Ray Stantz of New York Paranormal called the place "a living testament to the evil and the horror of the Mafia" because of what came down here during Prohibition. Her very own father called the grounds cursed, and paranormal blogger Buffy Summers once predicted that by the end of the decade, the Overlook was likely going to be in the news again. Could she have been predicting one of them going nuts and killing the others?

The door unclicked open and closed again. Kat looked back as Alex's vague shadow entered the room.

"That didn't take long." Kat spoke. "Can you pour me a cup of coffee before you stretch out?" She looked out and around the grounds. "We should have turned the parking lot lights on. We could see a lot further with them." She paused. "I bet the grounds lighting are controlled by a switch somewhere in the office. Maybe by an auxiliary door…"

She heard Alex make a low guttural gasp behind her head.

"Alex?" Kat turned around and saw a tall wizened figure in the room with long blonde hair like a female corpse in a loose rotted dress propped up near the corner of the bed. It had vacant blank eyes, lips peeled back around dead crooked teeth, dried tight wizen features and ruined tangled hair hanging in tatters down its back. Taken for a start, Kat hopped off the window and to her feet, hitting on the light and bathing the room in illumination. Taking just a second, the figure had vanished, but it had certainly left an impact on her. A scream frozen on her lips, Kat stood with her feet planted to the floor realizing what she had seen. It had been a ghost!

"Casper…" She mumbled the name of a friendly childhood spirit from her youth. "I wish you were here…"


	7. Chapter 7

7

Gabriella sat up in bed with her new best friends surrounding her. Maddie had brought her orange juice up from the kitchen to drink before heading to breakfast. Sonny and Alex sat on the bed with her, and Kat and Jessie stood a bit further from her. She had described to them what happened to her, and upon hearing it, Alex realized these ghosts were far unlike any raucous spirits she had ever seen. Maddie wasn't sure if she believed yet, but both Sonny and Jessie were starting to believe the place was haunted by something.

"It sounds like…" Kat was trying to rationalize the sighting using her knowledge from the paranormal field. "Some sort of residue haunting."

"What?" Sonny looked at her as if she was making it up.

"A place memory…" Kat explained. "Most researchers agree that ghosts are either surviving personalities that refuse to pass over or that they're just imprints of images and sounds imbedded in the substance of areas that get replayed by meteorological or by emotional activity. Some experts claim that the reason some people don't pass over as spirits is that they get bound to objects that are important to them in life. You could say that place memories could be why spirits get earthbound to begin with, but what Gabriella's describing…" She paused trying to rationalize it. "It could be energies from all the deaths here manifesting to her."

Alex scoffed. Jessie, Sonny and Maddie turned to look at her.

"You've got another opinion?"

"Look," Alex tossed her hair back with the back of her hand. "I may not be a paranormal investigator, but I know a few things too about ghosts, and these ghosts are crazy… They are trying to scare us like a bunch of bored mental patients…"

"And where do you get your research?" Kat asked.

"I'm a wizard." Alex said in her head, but what she really said out loud was something different. "My brother is a sort of… paranormal expert."

"Your brother…."

"Justin…"

"Never heard of him…" Kat confessed.

"No, you wouldn't…"

"Gabriella…" Maddie looked to her. "Do you feel up for joining us downstairs for breakfast? I could bring you something up if you prefer."

"I don't want to be left alone." Still reeling from dreams of her boyfriend and friends from high school taunting and haunting her, Gabriella echoed back demurely with her legs folded up before her like a scared young girl. "I'd rather stay with you guys." She peeled the blanket back on the bed and extended her feet off to the floor and stood in the same clothes she had been wearing last night. "Will one of you come up later with me so I can take a shower?"

"Sure…" Jessie pulled her close as they all realized how much they were bonding like sisters in this experience.

"What do you have waiting for us down stairs?" Sonny looked to Maddie. "I heard you and Jessie making breakfast early this morning."

"Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and orange juice." Maddie lead the way out of the room with Alex to lead Gabriella safely by her side. "Of course, we also have cold cereal if you want that…"

"How are we doing on eggs?" Alex turned to ask, but as she turned she noticed a seventh figure far beyond the five girls with her that skirted just out of her view. It looked like the sort of figure Kat had described, a tall, blonde cadaverous woman in a long white dress hurrying to hide out of view at the end of the hall. She was more like an afterthought, a brief image drifting just out of her sight. She wondered if she should mention her to the others then quickly changed her mind. After Gabriella and Kat's stories, they all needed some form of normalcy.

"Plenty…" Maddie answered. "But I don't want to be stuck making breakfast every morning for everyone. If I make something for myself, I can cook a little extra, but I don't want to be responsible for cooking for everyone."

"We're not expecting you to cook for us everyday… Are we?" Sonny followed their white-clad group through the hall to the first floor. "I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself."

"Well, " Jessie postured. "I have to take care of four kids. I know how to get a lot done really fast." She wondered fondly about her young wards. "I do hope they're being taken care of correctly while I'm away." They pushed through the metal swinging doors to the stairway down to the downstairs access hallway alongside the lobby. Another sharp turn, and they'd be in the main employee corridor. "Anyone know what time it is?"

"Eleven fifteen…" Kat noticed the clock first, but she wasn't sure if it was correct.

"Well, let's go eat breakfast so we can have lunch…" Alex followed Sonny down the hall. They were all slowly getting used to finding themselves through this place. The main employee and utility corridor ran the length of the place with a few side halls and numerous stairways to the top floors. The lobby area with the kitchen behind it was off center with the Colorado Lounge at the far end and the Gold Ballroom at the other. The Game Room was in the front hallway off the wall of photos on the other side of the lobby. They strolled silently through the place wondering why they were here and barely existing. They were alive, they were surviving and they had each other, but what life did they have knowing they friends and families were back home wondering where they were with no way to get a message out? The phones were still out, their transmitter radio wasn't getting a signal and outside, the snow had started again turning their winter wonderland into a frozen hell of snow and ice.

Alex pushed her way into the kitchen prep area first and noticed the food left out just as Maddie and Jessie had left it, but a second look and they realized it was not exactly the same. The platter with the bacon was empty, the metal tray with the scrambled eggs in it was half empty and the toast was all but depleted except for five pieces and the sixth one had a bite in it. The table had four used plates around it, four empty glasses and the clear plastic orange juice dispenser which Jessie had filled with orange juice concentrate was half empty, the liquid catch tray under the tap full of orange water. They stared at the mess with confused shock and annoyed frustration.

"Well, it's nice to know you two left us with something." Sonny spoke first.

"This is not how we left it!" Jessie looked at Maddie then to Sonny, Gabriella and Alex. Maddie walked through surveying the mess.

"There's got to be someone else in the hotel other than us." Kat announced.

"There's some left…" Gabriella took the large spoon and carved sections out of the scrambled eggs in the metal tray. "But I'm willing to eat cereal if you guys want it."

"It took us almost an hour to set this up." Maddie's heart was broken to see her work taken by someone else. She looked to Alex for answers then to Jessie and Sonny.

"Okay…" Alex took a deep frustrated breath and turned around. "We are searching this place and finding out who else is here! This place may be haunted, but I do know ghosts don't eat breakfast!"

"Well, actually…" Kat started.

"Don't want to hear it!" She heard the sound of someone's shoe scuff the floor in the hall and then the doors behind them get bumped open as their new intruders came to investigate their voices. It was four more girls, each of them clad in the same white attire they had all been left as forced guests of this place. They were all blonde, each of them attractive and eye-catching in their own different ways. Two of them resembled each other enough alike to be sisters, one of them was thin and petite with long blonde hair while their leader, a tall athletically built young adult with high cheekbones, brown eyes and shoulder-length curly hair acted as their leader.

"Who are you?" She asked frustrated and annoyed. "Why did you bring us here?"

"Well, if we had those answers, do you think we'd still be here?" Alex spoke first as if she and the others were staking their claim on the place.

"You're Mikayla, aren't you?" One of the girls asked.

"Of course, she's Mikayla!" Another one responded.

"Not this again..." Jessie recalled the problem with them seeing a resemblance in people from each other's lives.

"I am not Mikayla!" Alex insisted.

"This is impossible!" Sonny stood by Alex. "We watched this place all night long from the front and both ends! No one showed up here. There is no way anyone could have dumped anybody off last night!"

"We didn't watch the rear…" Gabriella revealed.

"But you said no one would use the rear to sneak us in here." Jessie turned to her.

"What are you girls talking about?" The tall blonde with the brown eyes looked around expecting answers.

"We're prisoners here." Maddie spoke. "And now, so are you…"

"What?"

"Have you seen outside?" Alex stood with her arms crossed before her chest and her eyes narrowed annoyingly. "We're in an isolated mountain hotel surrounded by four to six feet of snow all around us, the phone doesn't work, the transmitter radio isn't receiving and yet, as you have just noticed, someone or something is collecting us like baseball cards to live in this isolated hotel with each other. We're not going anywhere!"

"Well…" One of the curvy statuesque blondes stepped forward to confront her. "Have you tried going for help?"

"Across twenty-five miles of snowy mountain wilderness without knowing for certain where we're going in deep ice and snow?" Jessie responded. "I doubt we'd get twenty feet in these mountains."

"What's wrong with you idiots?" Alex hissed in this dual army of angry white clad young women in matching outfits. She was tired of explaining the circumstances to every new girl who got dumped here. "If we knew how to get out of here, we'd be gone already." She didn't like saying it the first time.

"And why should we believe you, Mikayla?" One of the girls rolled her eyes at Alex. The room simmered and drew quiet.

"I am not Mikayla!" Alex snapped. Maddie was off to the side trying to divvy up what was left of the scrambled eggs.

"Who's Mikayla?" Someone asked.

"Some one-hit wonder best known for feuding with Hannah Montana…"

"Oh, I love Hannah!" The tall blonde grinned and bobbed her head. "Despite what she calls herself now…"

"Hey, Miley's my best friend..."

"You know Hannah?" The other blonde looked up. "I met her at a Jonas Brothers concert some years back…"

Gabriella and Maddie looked at each other then to Alex and Sonny. Jessie started to say something then Kat turned around confused. With almost everyone talking at once, she wondered if this was something they should discuss openly. Was this even a subject that they should be discussing out loud?

"Hold up!" Kat pulled out a chair from the table and stood on it. "Is everyone here connected somehow to Hannah Montana?"

"I'm the nanny for Marty and Christina Ross's kids." Jessie announced. "They produced her movie, "Indiana Joanie!"

"Miley's my best friend." Lily Truscott stepped forward to reveal herself. "I am the first person in the world she told of her secret identity."

"Hannah once appeared on So Random…" Sonny wondered why she didn't think of this before.

"My boyfriend Phil and I once won tickets to see Hannah in Boston." Keely Teslow suddenly recognized Maddie. "That's where I've seen you before!"

"Oh my god!" Maddie somehow recognized the blonde beauty from that brief stay several years ago. Hannah had also stayed at the hotel at that time. Could that have anything to do with what they were doing here.

"I do the outfits for the Jonas Brothers." Stella Malone finally came forward. "That's how I met Hannah. She recorded a song with them."

"That's how we know each other." Maddie felt as if she'd been blind. "I met Hannah at the Tipton… That's how we're all connected. I bet we're all somehow connected to Hannah Montana…" She paused then walked through this gathering of white clad confused young girls. "I'd bet this hotel isn't even haunted. I'd bet we're all on some sort of hidden camera show."

"Oh, it's haunted…." Kat spoke up and looked at the sea of blonde and brunette heads. "But I doubt we're here because we're all connected to Hannah Montana. I mean… Hannah… Miley… She's a public persona. She meets over a thousand people a day. We could all be a few degrees of separation connected to almost any major celebrity. If anything…"

"Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa…" Teddy Duncan put her hands up before her and pushed between Alex and Sonny, stopping a few feet from Gabriella and Jessie near one of the industrial ovens. "Haunted?" Her head flitted left and right as her lips lightly parted in surprise. "What's haunted? This place?"

"Yep…" Alex looked to her to see how she handled it.

"But there's no such thing as ghosts…" Keely responded and looked from Stella over to Sonny and back to Lily.

"Look," Gabriella strolled forward in this gathering of white-attired young girls. "I don't exactly believe in ghosts… but I was surprised by something last night that looked very real to me." She still felt touched by it. The image of all those corpses staring at her was etched into her brain. That was the difference between being scared and surprised. She could get over being surprised, but being actually scared meant she still suffered the pangs of fear every time she flashed back to the images now trapped in her head of those empty eyes staring and watching her. "Whatever it was tricked me and fooled me…" She turned to Maddie for support, and Maddie pulled her close as if she was her sister to console her.

"Well, how haunted are we talking here?" Teddy was well aware of a few ghost stories through her brothers. "Are we talking Ted Raimi scary or Stephen King scary?"

"What's the difference?"

"About two million dollars in revenue…" Jessie quipped.

"Have you ever heard of the Hotel Overlook in Colorado?" Teddy asked.

"This is the Overlook in Colorado." Kat approached her at the same height.

The room drew quiet as everyone stopped talking.

"Oh crap…" Teddy had heard about this place through her father. A nervous and fearful sensation came up from her stomach through her spine to her head. "My dad does the pest report for this place every April when it re-opens. Do you know what happened here?"

"We have…" Sonny looked at Alex still trying to stare down Teddy. "…some idea…"

"Grab a plate and a fruit cup…" Maddie had saved what she could from the mess. "I say we go sit and get our bearings in the lobby and figure out what we're doing next." She paused. "Oh yeah, and from now on the kitchen is closed. In a kitchen this size, we can all fend for ourselves…"

Keely sighed out loud and looked to Stella who gave her a squeeze to the arm for support. Gabriella took a plate of eggs with a fruit cup and a cup of orange juice to sate her grumbling stomach. What was once four and had became six was now ten young women kept isolated from the outside world in this huge mountain lodge by forces or persons unknown. They did not have any answers, but more questions than before. Sonny followed behind their group then stopped and paused behind Kat and Lily. She recalled something from last night when she and Alex was comforting Gabriella from her horrifying experience. What was it that Alex had lost last night, and did she get it back already? She placed her plate with her eggs, fork and fruit cup down next to her glass of juice and turned toward the prep area. Getting down on her feet on the tiled floor, she looked under the table.

At first, she didn't see it, but another glance around the empty floor and she noticed it had come to rest in the mortar crack between the tiles and picked it up in her fingertips. Standing up, she looked it up and down. It looked like a magician's wand, a foot long of finely cut wood that had been hollowed that a feather could be inserted in it with the hard tip sticking out and runic symbols etched very faintly in the wood half, rounded at one tip and at a point on the feather end. She thought it might be some sort of souvenir from a magic show or a gift from a stage magician because of its innate potential as a wizard's wand. She half-heartedly waved it over the end of the room and briefly saw the outlines of people standing and watching her from the far end of the room. Taken aback, she jumped back from the sight of those non-existent people and started hurrying out… skidding to a step, turning around to grab her plate and drink and then resuming her way out of the room.

Behind her, she failed to hear the throaty male chuckle from the empty kitchen.


	8. Chapter 8

8

The sound of drums woke Sonny from her nap. She was back in her room on the second floor with the bathroom window over the front of the hotel. Alex had emptied her closet from her suite in the back of the hotel of everything she needed and had moved in with her. Room 237 was big and gracious, but after hearing Teddy Duncan claim that someone had died of a mob hit in the room, or that Delbert Grady had dumped the bodies of his murdered family in it, or of the woman who took her life in it, she did not want to sleep in there another night as long as she was in this hotel for the winter. She said she'd much rather take her chance with frostbite trying to walk the narrow mountain pass down to Sidewinder. Maddie and Gabriella crowded into the bed in the spare bedroom. Jessie, Kat and the other recent captives of this place had taken over other nearby rooms in the same area. Opening her eyes and lifting her head, Sonny listened for several seconds then laid her head down to the pillow once more; closing her eyes and trying to dream herself back home to Los Angeles.

The beat of drums occurred once more over her head. It was coming from upstairs in the apartment over their heads.

"Alex?" She whispered in the darkened blue darkness. "Alex…"

Alex was too deep into sleep to be wakened. From over head, Sonny could hear the drum start up again, joined by a muffled trumpet and then other instruments. It sound like a high school band practicing a marching beat. She could hear the drums, the woodwind instruments and a tuba with a steady beat starting up. It sounded like several people altogether. First thing she thought that it might have been Teddy, Stella, Keely and Lily, but they hadn't retired to rooms on the third floor. They had retreated to rooms on this floor because of the proximity to the lobby. Could one of them have got up to explore, found the instruments and encouraged the others for a late night movie session? It didn't sound likely. After Teddy's ghost stories confirmed what Kat knew about this place, no one wanted to explore this hotel without two to three others. Meanwhile, she heard the muffled pounding, the woodwinds blaring and the stomping of several feet from several people moving up and down the hallway upstairs over their heads. Didn't this noise bother anyone else?

"Alex? Alex, wake up!" Sonny turned and tried jostling the sleeping brunette in bed with her, but Alex refused to rouse from her sleep. Her lips partially apart, her head partially lolling back and forth from Sonny trying to wake her, she looked dead to the world. Sonny leapt to her feet to try waking Maddie and Gabriella, but as she did, the marching band upstairs started for the stairway, horns blasting, drums pounding and feet stomping the floor. Sonny heard them coming down the steps to her floor, and stopped outside the spare bedroom. She had to see who was waking all the noise. Her feet felt the vibration through the floor of the stomping, she heard the blaring horns getting louder as they got closer, the cymbals crashing as they came down into the open, but descending the few steps to her entry, she swung open the door expecting to see a phantom band just as the sounds stopped. The hotel drew quiet again.

Standing in the door in a white t-shirt and panties, she heard her breath passing in and out of her lips, her lungs hissing with air passing through her trachea and a light creak from her jaw muscles as she closed and parted her lips taking in her breath. It was not as spectacular a performance as the ghosts did to Gabriella, but now, Sonny realized she had a story to tell. Blinking her eyes tiredly, she turned to close the door then heard a fresh creak come from upstairs. Looking back, she heard a dull thunk followed by another creak. Another thunk followed accompanied by another creak, and Sonny looked back out to the hall…

Someone was coming down the stairs in a long dress. Sonny could see their feet taking each step through their night gown making each creak and the thunk was from the tip of a long axe whose splattered head struck each step in sync with the creak just three steps behind. Sonny watched as the figure descended low enough to reveal her identity, and finally she recognized Jessie's mottled face and drenched hair coming down in a gaze from the third floor. The front of her dress was splattered in dark blood, trace amounts littering her white zombie-like face. Passing Sonny, she looked up with a weird smile then dropped back into her trance-like state, dragging the axe behind her as she descended to the next floor. Sonny's heart was pounding faster, her widened eyes watched in cold terror unable to look away as the specter of the young Manhattan nanny drifted downstairs haunting the hotel. Stepping back, Sonny closed the door in shock and retreated back into her apartment. Her hands quickly locking and latching her door, Sonny stumbled backward up the steps to her living room and turned around in terrified shock.

Jessie had been asleep and curled up under a blanket in the large easy chair of her apartment the whole time!

"Stella, are you asleep?" Lily Truscott rested in a t-shirt and shorts in a room with Stella Malone down the hall from Sonny's apartment separated from them by the staircase and the elevator. Their apartment was a mirror copy of Sonny's with a bathroom window also perched over the front of the hotel. She was a bit worried. If she did not get back to college in time, she could lose her credits, and she wasn't sure if getting kidnapped, dragged across state lines and left to live by herself in a remote nearly inaccessible hotel in the Colorado Rockies would allow her to keep her scholarship. By her side, Stella stirred and sighed tiredly

"Kind of…" She responded.

"Do you really believe someone dumped us in this hotel just to live with ghosts for the winter?"

"I don't know."

"Why would anyone do that?"

"Someone with way too much time on their hands…" The gifted seamstress answered. "Are you really friends with Miley Stewart? Did you always know she was Hannah Montana?"

"Seriously?!" Lily lifted herself up on her arms next to her. "We've been dumped in a hotel with ghosts, and you want to ask me about my friendship with Miley?"

"I'd just rather talk about something other than ghosts."

"Well…" Lily lowered back down to her back. "Tell me about yourself… where are you from?"

"Okay…" Stella turned to her back and stared up to the faint crack crossing the ceiling of the bedroom. "Like yourself, I grew up with celebrities, Joe, Nick and Kevin Lucas of the band Jonas…" She paused briefly. "We went to Horace Mantis Academy near Teaneck, New Jersey and between school assignments I made and designed their clothes for the boys to wear to their concerts. I fell in love with Joe and we dated…"

"I liked Nick…" Lily confessed. "Miley and I once dressed up as a boy band to get close to them."

"That was you guys?" Stella had heard Joe tell that story once or twice. "You were Milo and Otis?"

"Let's just say Improv is not one our strong suits…" Lily rolled over to her side and yawned. "Miley was always dragging me into weird schemes…" Her demeanor turned depressed again. "Stella, do you think we're going to make it home?"

"We have six months here…" Stella exhaled deeply. "Maybe someone will find us before Christmas and will carry us out by helicopter so we can look back on this place and never look back…" She yawned tiredly as her mind drifted further and further away into the realm of sleep. Lily turned to her side and pulled the blankets up. Stella pulled on them too for her share, but Lily surrendered to her bit to cover herself up in bed. Tomorrow night if they were still in this place, they each get their own blanket or at least replace the bed with two twin cots. Trying to drift off, Lily listened to Stella's breathing then closed her eyes and wondered if she was listening to her breath. Holding her breath to see if it got a reaction from her, she heard the wind outside pounding on the hotel and the pitter of snow scattering on the place. It must have been getting colder and colder out there, but at least she was protected inside this creepy hotel. She then heard the creak of a faucet being turned and water running from another apartment. It sounded so close, but then she realized there shouldn't be anyone in the apartment beyond the wall. Everyone she knew about… Teddy, Alex, Keely, Sonny, Gabriella, Kat and the rest… they were either in the adjacent bedroom in this apartment or in the apartment down the hall beyond the elevator. Worst yet, the creaking faucet sounded as if it was coming from her bathroom right next to her. Stella was still next to her in bed. Who was in their bathroom?

A full-figured presence with long dark locks emerged from the bathroom door wearing a form-fitting white shirt and tight blue shorts, stopping at the end of the bed and looking back to Lily.

"Miley?" Lily lit up with a grin as her best friend strided into the living room area in her bare feet. "How did you get here?" She pushed her bedcovers aside and followed after her, stopping in the exterior room of the apartment as Miley pushed a chair over to the light fixture in the landing over the door.

"Miley, I'm so glad you're here!" Lily talked to her best friend having come to join her. "Can you take me home? There's a bunch of other girls here too, but… what are you doing?" She watched as her best friend stepped on to the chair and tied some rope to the fixture with a noose then sticking her head through it. Stella stirred after hearing Lily's voice then not finding her next to her. In front of her, Lily watched unable to react as Miley strung herself up, kicked the chair out then watched her neck stretched out by her falling body underneath. Her terrified scream resounded through the hotel as the image dissipated before her horrified eyes.

"Lily?" Hearing the screams, Stella came running just as Teddy and Keely came running. Keely struggled with a robe.

"What happened?!"

"I don't know!" They scrambled for the terrified former celebrity sidekick. Alex, Sonny, Jessie had gathered outside their apartment looking for answers.

"What happened?"

"Where'd she go?!" Stella asked urgently as Alex pointed to the stairwell and followed behind after them. Several feet ahead, Lily tore through the first floor and raced north looking for a way out of this place. Right now, she didn't care about snow or ice, but she wasn't staying in this place another second. Discovering the doorway to the parking lot, she quickly flew through the locks with her breath racing through her teeth and her heart pounding against her chest. A burst of cold wintry air hit her as she pushed the door open and raced into the cold snow covered veranda. The warmth of her body dissipated fast, her bare feet turned to numb stubs upon hitting the snow and she fell forward into the frozen icy ground. Behind her, Teddy, Alex and Sonny screeched to a stop from the cold and reacted with their natural first instinct to quickly dodge back inside into the warmth. Looking out, they saw Lily lifting herself up frozen, weeping and terrified and unprotected from the Arctic-like weather and trying to crawl to freedom. Unsure what to do, Alex and Teddy gasped and looked at each freezing inside the doors, mentally committed themselves then took deep breaths to dash out themselves barefoot and uncovered into the snow to get Lily back. The weather sliced through them just as fast. Robbing them of warmth and transforming them into shuddering, shaking and trembling masses needing rescue themselves. Maddie, Kat, Jessie and Sonny joined the frozen slumber party outside as they struggled to get each other back inside the hotel and its heated walls. Lily tried to push Alex away than go back inside the place, but Teddy suddenly found a personal wind and lifted her up on her trembling shuddering legs. If it was this bad just fifteen feet out the door, had bad would it be trying to hike down the mountain? Getting back inside took longer than it took to get outside, but looking up to the second floor, Jessie thought she saw two little girls staring out from a darkened room, holding hands and grinning as they forced Lily back into forced safety within the Overlook Hotel.


	9. Chapter 9

9

Once back inside, Gabriella and Keely wrapped Lily up tight in as many blankets they could take from the housekeeper's closet in the hall while everyone who been outside in the snow either jumped into the showers fully clothed with the hot water turned on full blast, not hot enough to scald them but to feel some warmth again, or huddled in blankets in front of the heater trying to regain their body warmth. It was kind of obvious Lily had seen something that drove her to try to escape the hotel, just as Gabriella had tried the other night. Alex curled and uncurled the dexterity back into her frozen fingers, and Jessie complained that the cold here was worse than anything she had felt in New York, but then, she added, she had never tried taking a hike in it in just her underwear. Sonny and Maddie had run down to the kitchen to make some hot chocolate, dumping eight instant packets into a large metal kettle and bringing it up to a boil. They brought it up by elevator on a cart, and although it tasted like weak melted chocolate, the experience forced them all to bond once more. They took turns checking on Lily through the night checking her fingers and toes of frostbite, but by the first lights on the distant orange horizon, Alex and Keely were still awake and feeling the effects of the night.

"Kelly…"

"Keely…"

"I'm never going to get that." Alex spoke and huddled in her blanket trying to hold on to the warmth. "I got a question…" She took a deep breath. "What would you do if I told you I was a wizard?"

Keely sat silently and sipped the weak hot chocolate left over from last night, but by now, it was just warm chocolate flavored water. She mentally processed what Alex had said, looked up to her baby doll like features with the brown eyes and wild dark hair then glanced away with a light yawn.

"What would you do if I told you I was dating a guy from the future?" Keely answered.

Alex sat quiet in her seat as if her mind was processing the circumstances.

"Yes, that's what I figured." Alex stood up and looked in on Lily in the bedroom trussed up and bound in blankets like a giant butterfly waiting to burst from her cocoon. Only part of her face could be seen, but she looked so serene. The toilet flushed in the bathroom, and a minute later, Jessie strolled out still fussing with her large mane of auburn colored locks.

"What do you think she saw last night?" She asked Alex.

"Two creepy brown-haired girls…"

"Who do you think they are?"

"Delbert Grady's daughters…" Kat appeared in the apartment in a white t-shirt and slacks. "According to police reports, he had bludgeoned them both with an axe."

"How many ghosts are in this place?" Alex turned to her.

"Well…" Kat strolled through and peeked in on Lily to see of she was alive. Noticing her breathing, she lifted her head up and tossed her long hair back over her left shoulder. "The most in-depth analysis of this place was in 2005 by William Collins and the Collinsport Ghost Society. They were joined by representatives from at least eight other groups for three weeks here, and they cataloged over fifty-two possible individual entities, but psychic Frank Bannister said the number was far higher because of spirits constantly passing through here back and forth from the other side."

"There's a spirit portal here?" Alex impressed Keely with her knowledge of the field.

"With activity this thick, are you surprised?" Kat answered then changed to subject. "Look, I came to tell you that Teddy's roasting a couple small chickens to eat. If you want one, you better go let her know."

"Who's going to watch…"

"I'll stay with her." Kat answered. "Just go eat…"

"Okay…" Alex and Keely shared glances to each other and turned the way out. Yawning tiredly after their frozen nearly-nude wrestling match last night, Kat felt her ears pop from the altitude and listened to the girls squirreling themselves from the room down to the lobby on their way to the kitchen. Dropping into the chair in the chair by the archway, Kat noticed a few token books in the corner shelf. They looked like the books she saw in a yard sale or a school classroom. Tom Sawyer, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Gulliver's Travels, and Old Yeller to name a few, but she pulled the Iliad out to peruse. It wasn't a bad time to brush up on her Greek Mythology, but when she opened it, she found one blank pages after another. The whole book was blank. She checked Old Yeller. It too was blank, and so was The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. They were all blank. They were all just props for the setting. What did this mean? Was it another clue that nothing was as it seemed? Out the side of her senses, the water in the bathroom suddenly turned on by itself.

Dropping the blank books to the floor, Kat scowled lightly perplexed and looked to Lily unconscious to the world. High water pressure could make faucets slowly come on by themselves, but in a hotel this size with water pipes running all over the place, was that even possible? Slowly rising and treading lightly on her feet past Lily in her bed, Kat noticed the hot water blasting full forth, steam rising from the sink, condensation from the air filling the mirror. She tried turning it off, but the metal tap was already hotter than she could handle. It also felt as if it had welded itself open, and as she wrestled to turn it off, the faucet in the tub surprised her by exploding on. When she turned to acknowledge it, the door to the bathroom slammed shut on her. The steam was quickly filling the room. Neither one wanted to turn off. The room was getting hotter, the air in the room was turning into a sauna as Kat attacked the door and pounded on it.

"Lily, wake up!" She kicked and pounded on it. "Open the door!"

The Malibu teen barely stirred in bed under the blankets.

Pulling off her shirt soaking with sweat, Kat stood in her bra and slacks and pounded and kicked harder and harder. The room was getting hotter and harder to breath. Beads of perspiration formed on her forehead, ran down her face and neck to her chest and filled her eyes.

"Lily!" She was screaming. "Lily! Open up the door!" Kat felt her lungs searing as she inhaled the hot air filling the room. She pounded so hard that the palms of her hands started bleeding and running down her arms. Coughing and choking, Kat suddenly recalled the window with the snow in it. The weather outside could cool off the room if she could get it open, but she also knew that as well as poltergeists could play games with doors and windows that they could not alter the molecular properties of glass. Sweating and choking, her eyes full of sweat, Kat removed the top off the toilet's water tank and smashed the glass in the window with the ceramic lid as a gust of wind exploded into the room and froze the sweat onto her body. At the same time, the hot water in both taps shut off and the door innocently opened.

Sitting up in bed, Lily looked around the room and pushed the eight blankets off her trying to free herself. What was she still doing here? Five minutes ago, she was back at Southside High School with Miley and Oliver and obsessing over a hard homework assignment, but then two strange girls in blue dresses appeared to her in the school hallway, jarring her awake. Gasping for air, her chest pounding through her sweat-stained bra, Kat staggered from the bathroom, dropped to sit down on the edge of the bed and fought to catch her breath. She closed the door to keep the cold wind trapped to the bathroom.

"What happened?" Lily looked at her not really wanting to hear the answer.

"Oh…" Kat dried herself off with a towel. "The hotel just tried to kill me…" She responded matter-of-factly.

"Those look good, right?" Down in the Overlook kitchen, Teddy looked at the chickens in the oven. Standing by her like an imperfect bookend, Maddie looked in with her long blonde tresses pulled back into a ponytail.

"Good enough…" Maddie responded. "Is this how your mother cooks?"

"Nobody cooks like my mother…" Teddy closed the oven with a slight roll of her eyes and looked around for the bottle of water she had been drinking. Removing the cap and tipping it back to her lips, her brown eyes looked to Maddie once as she sated her thirst then lowered, recapped the bottle and placed it aside in the prep area. "The meat is the hard part, the easiest part is the vegetables. I think we can reheat one of those large vegetable cans from the pantry as a side dish."

"I'll get it…" Maddie looked up to the storeroom. More conditioned to this place because of her job at the Hotel Tipton back home, she had been a part in some way or another in every aspect of hotel work from candy girl, desk job, running day care and even handling bookings. She had never handled cooking for multiple people, but she had never backed away from pitching in and working. Even Marion Moseby appreciated her strong work ethic; he had even wanted her to come along as his assistant when he went off to handle the operations of the passenger accommodations on the S.S. Tipton, but Maddie preferred to stay home as she worked her way through college.

Behind her, Teddy stole a piece from one of the baked chickens and slipped it to her lips, her brown eyes rolling in delight to taste their savory juices trapped in the meat. Clicking the heat down a few degrees, she already heard the voices of the girls enjoying the meals, but with those imaginary words of praise, she also heard a light giggling, and her head rose distracted to the hall beyond the coolers and kitchen manager's office where a slight blonde girl three feet high in pink and white stood looking at her.

"Charlie?" Her lips alighted to a grin that spread to her cheeks and a twinkle to her eyes. "Charlie, are you here with dad?" She shifted her weight and turned on her heel toward her sister who suddenly and distractedly raced up the employee corridor. Turning into the hall, Teddy could see her baby sister running and giggling the long hall behind the length of the lobby heading toward the Gold Ballroom at the far end. The only thing going through Teddy's mind was whether or not her father was here early to do the pest inspection for the hotel and getting to go home early from this isolation. Trying to keep up with the sprightly pixie was something else. Charlie seemed able to keep several feet ahead of her even as Teddy tried to catch up. Charlie vanished around a corner and brought Teddy even closer to the Gold Ballroom, whisking around a corner and vanishing completely this time.

"Charlie…" She began suspecting now the hotel was playing games with her as well. Maddie and the twins, Gabrielle with her boyfriend… This all seemed too similar... This place had ghosts... and it could imitiate people from their pasts. It liked screwing around with their minds.

She now felt the prickly sensation of imaginary fingers stroking the back of her neck as she looked down into the dark maw of a stairwell that would take her to the hotel boilers and the laundry room on the basement. Reluctant to meet what was waiting for her down there, Teddy bid a mental farewell to the shade of her sister and turned back toward the direction of the hotel kitchen certain that Maddie would be looking for her. The humming sound of the air ducts warming the cooling hotel in sections followed her joined by the metallic clink of the metal ducts expanding and contorting from the heat going up, but there was another sound with them. Teddy quickened her steps to escape them rather than see what was making them. From the ballroom, she heard the clinking glass, the faint elevator like music and with them the distant cacophony of murmuring voices… It was like what Gabrielle had described...

Her teeth gritted together and her head lightly shaking, Teddy tried to get ahead of them and past the ballroom. They were just sounds, but she knew to be afraid of what was making them. She heard a hearty male laughter, a spectrum of voices echoing around her from all directions at once and then other voices that sounded much closer.

"Teddy…" A make beckoner directed her closer. A curt gasp from her lips and the Colorado native jumped away from the utility hallway doors. The corridor was empty but for the carts and stacks of rolling tray neatly lined along the length of the trip down to the far end.

"Are you playing the game?" A lady's phantom voice came from the dishwasher room, and Teddy turned just before the hotel manager's office through the wooden doors into the back hallway near the front lobby. From here, she could go around the admission desk, past the front public bathrooms and back to the kitchen or screaming upstairs to hide in a suite, but once she turned the corner for the lobby, she was met by other parties…

"Hello, Teddy…" The apparitions of the Grady twins met her arrival to the lobby. Barely four feet tall with shoulder length brown hair combed and pulled back from their bare blank expressions, Sherri and Teri Grady were dressed in the blue and white attire of another age. They looked up to her non-emotionally, trapped in phantom form and non-threateningly, but yet, their appearances harbored intense dread.

"Will you play with us?"

Shaking, trembling uncontrollably and stumbling backward, Teddy somehow realized that she wanted nothing to do with them. Not wanting to return the way she had come, barred from crossing the lobby, the nearly hysterical young woman felt like a young girl in their imposing presence and backed to the way beyond the lobby stairwell toward the Gold Ballroom. Not sure where she was going, she felt she had been herded into this direction, and hastening her way to find someone, she looked up to see Alex coming at her from around the corner, teeth-clenched, maddened eyes, strewn in blood and weaving an axe at head level toward her face.

In the kitchen, Maddie heard the shrill scream and jumped with a surprised shock, dropping the opened can of California vegetables to her feet, which hit its bottom rim and landed flat on its bottom without spilling an ounce of its contents. Alex and Keely had heard it while coming down the staircase at the end of the hall of photos off the lobby and paused to look at each other. Jesse and Gabrielle stopped from getting to know each other in the hotel's gift shop, and Stella and Sonny stopped from reflecting on their experiences in the entertainment industry while staring out the front lobby windows as the wintry weather keeping them hotel bound. Certain she knew where the scream had come, Sonny took charge and assumed a defiant pose wishing to check the noise. To her ears, it sounded real, and with Stella coming up behind her, she took the bottom landing of the staircase through the bottom arch into the front hidden corridor where Teddy rested splayed on the floor before the table.

"Teddy!" They feared for her condition and rushed to check on her health. Shaking and crying, Teddy couldn't stop trembling and quivering. The place was getting to her… maybe they weren't ghosts; maybe they weren't hallucinations… maybe it was her mind driving her to the brink of hysteria. She had felt the apparition of Alex striking her with the axe, but she vanished once she hot the floor. She looked up to Sonny and Stella unsure what to do to help her; they tried supporting her… that was all they could do…

"Teddy, what did you see? What did you see?" Stella questioned her almost more scared than Teddy to hear the answer.

"We're going to die here…." Shaking and crying uncontrollably, Teddy's eyes were full of tears within Sonny's caring embrace…


	10. Chapter 10

10

What had started as one had become four and then became six only to escalate to ten. The mystery of a few stranded girls had become only deeper as a few had turned into several. If Alex had wanted to strand herself here and live content by herself with a huge hotel all to herself, she could have done it. She had the mystical and psychic ability to do it. Sitting alone in the kitchen and sipping her chocolate milk and nibbling at her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, she tried rationalizing the situation. Could her evil clone have returned and stranded her here to take over her life? If so, shouldn't someone have noticed the difference and come looking for her, but if that was the case, why were the other girls here? Did her evil half think far enough to pick and strand other girls to keep her company? That hypothesis didn't make sense when she thought it out, but then neither did the one with a bored nutcase dragging them out here and just abandoning them to live together in distant seclusion as if he was collecting attractive women in one huge collection. The fact that she had lost her powers and the fact her abductor was getting in and out unseen and leaving several female captives meant whoever it was had to have mystical powers. That seemed likely… very more likely the more she thought about it, but considering it convinced her that she had to tell the others she was a wizard, but without her powers, how could she prove it? She needed them to trust her.

"Hi Alex…" Kat had strolled in wearing a white t-shirt and shorts. "Are you alone?"

"Yeah…" Alex finished off her sandwich then sipped the rest of her chocolate milk. "But then so are you."

"I think we're the only ones not completely freaked out by this place." Kat had strolled up to a huge pot of soup she had started with chunks of pot roast and a few cans of vegetables. She stirred the carrots, peas, corn and potatoes around in the pot, noticed the chunks of roast coming apart in the brew and replaced the lid to it. It was a large six gallon pot, enough to make soup to last a few days for ten girls, but then, they weren't quite sure if the hotel might give birth to new girls popping from the other rooms. So far, new faces had popped up every two days, but it was two days since Teddy and the others had arrived and they had not seen anyone new… unless the current weather had proved even too inclement for their abductor or he was taking a break. She and Alex lifted their heads to the wind whistling over the place.

"Sounds like a female spirit lightly gasping…" Kat described it.

"Sounds to me like ten girls who are never going to see their families again…" Alex strided over to put her dishes in the sink then place her large hotel-sized container of jelly in the industrial cooler with the eggs and containers of milk.

"You really don't know that…" Kat looked up from her cooking.

"I can guess…" Alex gasped herself and pulled her hair loose to adjust the clip holding it out of her face. "I'm going to go check on Sonny. I left her reading under the windows in the lounge area…"

At the end of the hotel beyond the wall opposite Room 237, Sonny dozed before the fire in the large fireplace of the Colorado Lounge. Large rugs with Navaho and Apache motifs hung down the walls watching over her as the light blue colors of the wintry weather permeated the room through the twenty-foot high windows overlooking the back of the hotel. The room looked both grand and otherworldly as both electric lights and the illumination from snow outside fought to overtake the mood of the room. Listening to the crackling of wood and popping of air busting from pockets in the block of wood dragged in from outside, Sonny had dropped off while reading. Kat had said the books in the second floor apartment had been blank, but by time they got to them, they had print in them. The books in the cabinets of the lounge also looked normal, and Kat hesitantly passed off what she had seen as a figment, but Sonny was so tired these days. During the day, she was stressing and waiting to be retrieved from this place by her mother, and at night, she was hearing phantom marching bands, invisible girls running and giggling through the halls and other strange sounds. Jesse had said she had heard a couple making love upstairs above her room, but no one had bothered to check until the rays of morning. Teddy had also heard the girls giggling and confused them with her baby sister, but she also heard other sounds… champagne bottles popping, the clinking of glasses, voices and footsteps, particularly near the lobby and the area of the Gold Ballroom on the other end of the hotel. More disturbing were the brief glimpses of people vanishing around corners, thin cadaverous shadows resembling anatomy skeletons in dried out suits and faded long gowns. Even worse were the nightmares. Sonny had lived through a few, and she was certain the others were remaining silent about the disturbing images in their dreams, namely, Stella, Keely, Maddie and Kat… than risk the odd looks and stares trying to decipher them.

Stirring on the large leather sofa she was stretched out on, Sonny blinked her doe-like eyes and yawned, her blue and gray plaid blanket slipping off her as she yawned again, her book, "American Gods," by Neil Gaiman slipping closed from her chest where it once rested open now falling to the floor and closing title side up on the floor between her and the table. She hadn't finished the peanut butter and jelly sandwich Alex had made for her. The crusts and a quarter of it rested on the Overlook china dish. The fire was still burning silently. Her eyes rounded trying to pop the sleepiness from her fine facial features, and she grunted tiredly remembering where she was. A glance around the Native American features of the room, and she pulled her long brown hair back behind her left ear, fighting back another yawn from erupting from her lips as she nibbled through the last of her sandwich and rolling around the contents of her chocolate milk at the bottom of her glass to stir them. Tipping back the glass to finish it off, she placed it back down by her plate and reached down to retrieve her book.

Sonny winced and held her right arm horizontally across her chest and hurriedly sat back up after extending her fingers around the binding of the book. It felt as if her stomach acid was burning up the center of her chest, but there was another sensation of discomfit she was experiencing. Her head was feeling both numb and heavy at the same time. Trying not to blame Alex for her sandwich-making experience, she tried to stand to get on her feet, but the lightheadedness forced her back down to her seat.

"Alex?" She faintly murmured as she looked to the end of the room to the direction of the lobby. Lightly trembling, her head and body swaying lightly back and forth, she looked nervously scared and shuddered as her stomach and head both told her something unnatural was happening inside her. Her brown eyes peering left and right, she tried lifting herself up once again and felt a million pinpricks all through her body. What was happening? Did Alex slip her something? She'd never had these feelings before. Dropping to the sofa, she instead landed on her hands and knees on the floor scared and terrified as she crawled out from between the sofa and the table. Shaking uncontrollably, she just wished she could vomit and get out of her whatever was bothering her, but whatever it was, it was actually getting worse. Her body was quivering as if she was freezing, but her head felt hotter than she thought was possible. Struggling to stand on her feet was making her feel worse, and after pushing herself up by the coffee table, she staggered to her left and braced herself on the wall, her hands falling on the fireplace mantle chin high in front of her.

"Alex?" Looking to the end of the room, she wept terrified to be sick and alone with a tear rolling down her face and past her petrified lips. She felt as if she couldn't get a breath as if her sweater was tightening on her chest, and as she struggled to hold herself up, she noticed she couldn't lift her arms. Her sweater was holding her arms from reaching over her head, and as she forced her arms up, she ripped her sleeve open under arm. That's when she noticed in her sick delirium what she hadn't noticed before. Her sweater was just shrinking on her. Her sleeve was bound up short around her elbow, her abdomen and midriff was showing and her form-fitting slacks seemed much more form fitting and ill-suited for her size. That's when her terrorized eyes realized the terrifying truth from the mantle now dipping down lower in front of her… she was getting taller!

"No-no-no-no-no-no…" She begged hysterically under her breath in shock. "Someone stop it!" Her panic-stricken inaudible voice could barely scream. She was going into shock. She could feel the seam of her slacks ripping wide open up her legs, the top of them tightening on her hips, and a million threads in her sweater coming undone and turning her sweater into a mass of threads hanging from her body. Her heart was pounding faster and faster, her head darting back and forth terrified someone was about to enter the room and freak out at seeing her over eight feet tall. Her left hand reached up and pounded the ceiling with a thunderous impact as her breath came faster and faster, a single breath ripping her bodice free of earthly restraints just before she starting falling backward…

"She's hyperventilating!" In the real world, Maddie was screaming as they pushed the table away from Sonny on the floor. She and Alex were trying to wake the TV star from her nightmare as Stella paced around her and watched uncertain what to do. Alex had come and found Sonny choking to make a breath and clawing at her throat. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't awake.

"Sonny, wake up!" Crazed with worry, Alex shook her. "Wake up!"

"Hit her chest!" Stella screamed unable to turn away.

"What?!"

"I saw it in a movie!" The gifted seamstress confessed as Alex and Maddie looked at each uncertain what to do.

"Paper bag!" Gabriella dropped and scattered the contents of a drawer from the cabinet on the other side of the room and came running with a white paper bag she had opened and blew into once to inflate. Mentally thanking her health teacher Miss Hudgins from East High, she dropped down next to Maddie and showed them what to do. Watching from the floor, Alex watched as Sonny seemingly broke from her trance and looked to Stella standing over her then to her and over to Maddie and Gabriella. Her breath was coming slower at last, but then Alex tried offering her the last of her chocolate milk on the table. Her heart still racing in her chest, Sonny wrapped her hand over Gabriella's hand holding the bag to her mouth then shook her head furiously against drinking anything. Maddie comfortingly stroked Sonny's hair back to assuage her fears.

"We've got to get out of this place…" Lily understated the obvious. She and the other girls were in the game room of the hotel which was limited to five outdated video games, a dartboard and three pool tables to take their interest until April 1 and the re-opening of the road down the mountain from the Overlook. Jessie and Teddy were faking a half-hearted game of pool, and she and Keely were throwing darts at a bull's-eye. Kat came strolling into the room looking for them, hesitated and lightly posed on one leg near the phone booth then brushed her hair back for a sip of water from the fountain. Teddy hit the five-ball into the pocket at the table and came around the corner pretending to be an expert player trying to figure out how to bounce the three-ball off the felt into the same pocket.

"I don't know if I can do this for four more months." Jessie sighed. She thought she'd heard a distant whistle, looked around once then shrugged it off.

"By time, we're rescued…" Teddy attempted her shot. "We might all be expert pool players." The three-ball hit the felt but deflected into another direction. "Or not…"

"Hey…" Jessie came near Lily and tugged at her sleeve as Keely took her chance with the darts. "Did Miley ever use one of those to turn into Hannah Montana?" She pointed at the phone booth.

"She's a pop star, not a costumed superhero!" Lily announced with a sarcastic eye roll. Behind her, Kat's head cocked to the side, and she turned round searching the room.

"Did someone hear a whistle?" She asked.

"I did…" Jessie confessed.

"So did I…" Keely added to the enigma as the distant sound occurred again. This time, they all heard it. There were four doors in the room. The double doors exited out to the hallway going toward the secondary entrance, the single door to the same hall and then another door into the game room's storage room. Standing near the phone booth near the hall, Kat stepped out and heard the whistle more clearly in the hall and then sound of a rhythmic clicking. It was coming from the room across the way. Teddy, Keely, Jessie and Lily had followed her out of abject bored curiosity and watched as Kat rationally reached up and flipped on the light switch to the darkened room. Jessie was expecting a dead body or a floating immaterial corpse, but the switch instead illuminated a series of lighted backdrops on the walls fully revealing a vast table top train set on counter surfaces extending through the room. Their reticent curiosity now turned to childlike awe as they perused almost a hundred and sixty square feet of a model train setting at waist level encompassing just over half the size of the room. The walls were painted landscapes to give the illusion of the set going off into infinity, and the ceiling was painted like a night sky as the five girls wandered through gasping at the model town, and the three toy trains speeding over bridges through the tiny town, going in and out of mountains barely three feet tall and charging through tiny suburban settings. Her eyes bending down to peruse the tiny setting, Teddy guessed the model was in a one by eighty-seven scale, pretty typical for model train enthusiasts, but the level of detail was incredible. It looked like a model set version of Sidewinder, she recognized the scale model for the House On The Rock, a local landmark for the area. The others were just as impressed. They could take hours just studying and analyzing the little situations on the set and the hand-crafted attention to detail to artificially create cliffs, trees, structures, ponds, creeks and the town. Keely bent down to gaze eye level with the table upon a small one-room schoolhouse with children playing in a miniature schoolyard setting, and Lily stood shining over a small movie theater with people lined up outside a ticket booth. Jessie watched the train coming out of the mountain down on to a trestle over the other train entering another tunnel and then noticed a tiny sign identifying the city as Sidewinder. It wasn't the real city, but at least they saw green grass and green trees on a scale far beneath them. Lily rolled a tiny sports car through imaginary traffic to the fake train depot at the edge of the table then noticed a sign in the room, "Please Don't touch The Exhibit." Under that, it said, "Please Don't Leave Children Unattended In The Room." After gazing in child-like awe at the hours of handcrafted people, houses and properties created to enhance the trains, Kat lifted her eyes and noticed the control switch at the end table near the end of the room. The whole model was in a "G" pattern with the center reserved for the guests to control the trains of their choosing and gauge their speeds. The switches offered enthusiasts ten minutes for a quarter, ten minutes for fifty cents and a dollar for thirty minutes to run each train. She pictured several men reliving their childhoods by playing or watching the train set in here, then wondered why they were lured in here. Was the train on a timer when it wasn't used, or had Alex or Maddie left it running earlier in the day.

"I know two boys who would love this!" Jessie announced knowing Ravi and Luke Ross back home. "When I get home, I'm definitely bringing them back here."

"My dad once started one of these for my brother PJ…" Teddy looked up and around their faces. "But he stopped once he realized how much work and time it took." Lily imitated a car horn and rolled another of the cars, but Kat stopped her and lightly scolded her. Keely was still obsessing over the effort it must have taken to make a tiny Gothic haunted house marked "For Sale" in a tiny realtors sign to the other figures or the tiny wedding scene near the church with the model bride and groom and dozens of well-wishers. Beyond that was a miniature cemetery with a lone gravedigger seemingly waiting and staring out to the doorway of the room.

"Okay, I think I've seen enough…" She strolled for the doors. Teddy and Kat turned as well, but Lily looked back to Jessie standing and gazing over the partial model of the Overlook itself against the end of the room. According to the model, the train whizzed by just at the bottom slope beyond the trees. She wondered how close this model of the city was to the real thing. Could there be a real train just down under the trees in the distance of the real hotel?

"Jessie?"

"Just a minute…" Jessie worried about the Ross kids back home and gazed down over the fake hotel's parking with a scant five cars parked out front then down its driveway pass where the red locomotive had rolled to a stop near a crossing, blocking the motorists of a tiny Hot Wheels Dodge Charger. Struggling to pull herself away, she gazed at the miniature schoolhouse, to the miniature gas station and then to the diminutive fishing hole in the corner by the door. Kat must not have switched it off right, or it was controlled by a timer, because the train started again and the red locomotive pulling a line of silver passenger cars started again separate from the other two, making the bend to turn back on itself, go through a tunnel and emerge on the other side of the model Overlook on its way over a train trestle through the center of the tiny village of stores, brownstones and businesses. When she turned round, the lights went out on her and left her in darkness to the sound of the train in the room. Could they as well as the train set be on a timer?

"Guys?" Jessie partially stumbled and felt around for the door to find her way out, pulling open the door and quickly hastening forward to find herself not in the same hall as before. The hotel was changing around her, and instead of the simple hotel corridor she found herself in the aisle of two long rows of empty benches facing forward to the front of the room. The walls were lined with a series of windows of flashing images like a subway car, and she slowly began to realize what this room was from the jostling vibration under her feet. She was in a train passenger car like the one she had seen in the model train set, and it was a very powerful illusion to her eyes and ears. It was almost as if she was actually in the model. Looking around confused and disconcerted she tried to leave the illusion by going out the way she had come in, but the door behind her wouldn't open again.

"Teddy? Lily!" She pounded at it. "Let me out!" She even heard the train whistle blowing and felt the empty passenger car gently tilt on the sharp turn. "Guys, I think I'm really tripping out here!" The train now began slowing, and Jessie leaned bent back and pounded the door with her body with the entire car coming to a full stop on the tracks. Out the corner of her eye, she saw the sign welcoming her to the model of Sidewinder, Colorado and then the shadows of the frozen figures outside now brought to meet her shrunk down to their size. Stumbling lightly as the train finally stopped, she noticed the door at the far end of the passenger car sway open from the momentum.

"Teddy!" Jessie was screaming as loud as she could. "Alex! Maddie!" She rushed out and down to the platform of the model train station now blown up several times to her size. Was this her fault? Did she get hypnotized into this bizarre predicament by staring too long into the model or had she actually get sucked into it by the ghosts? She saw manikins around her of people frozen in normal situations. Kids running, a mother pushing a stroller, a train conductor strolling by her, a female figure in the ticket window and workmen hoisting and moving luggage to board. Beyond them, she saw all the aspects of the model town, the figures, the Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels posing as real cars and trucks, but she could also look up and see the sky over her transformed into a very distant darkened ceiling very much like a starry sky. It was bad enough she was snowbound in a haunted hotel, but now she was shrunk down to the scale of a model train set? What was happening here?

"Teddy!" Jessie was screaming and staring off the horizon of the table for help. Her shoes had clicked across the plastic model train station and now crunched on the Styrofoam grass like fake green snow. "Somebody! Please wake me up!" She caught her breath and screamed again. "Get me out of here…" Part of the darkness in the horizon moved, and Jessie realized it was a figure. Someone was still in the room at normal size near the door, and as they drifted closer, Jessie recognized Gabriella coming up on her. Compared to her, she looked almost a thousand feet high because the closer she came to the table there was more and more of her to see until all Jessie could see was the huge wall of Gabriella's form-fitting pants coming up to the table and her sweater another hundred feet beyond that. She couldn't even see her face from the model, and Jessie realized how horrifying it was to be this small for the fake people at this size. Worse yet, she watched as Gabriella reared her right hand up and tried to crush her under her hand.

Nearing the Colorado Lounge, Teddy, Kat, Lily and Keely heard Jessie screaming her head off behind them and froze where were and looked back the way they had come to see Jessie scrambling out of the model train room on her hands and knees on the floor into the hall. A brief look to Kat, and they were racing back with Lily to find out what had happened. Lily slid to the floor by Jessie shaking and stuttering in shock. Her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. It had to be the most frightening manifestation yet.

"Jessie?" Teddy and Kat tried comforting her. "Jessie? What is it?" The raven-haired Manhattan nanny was shaking controllably and trembling so much they couldn't stop her. "What did you see?"

"Her heart must be pounding like crazy." Keely held her hand and wrist. "I can feel her pulse throbbing like a freight train."

Her face contorted with worry, Lily started peeking back into the model train room.

"Don't go in there!" Jessie screamed. "Lock it, block it or seal it off!" She couldn't stop shaking, but she was awake from the dream and back to normal size with the girls. "But don't go on there!" She broke down crying and held on to Teddy for solace weeping and trembling. Gently rubbing her back, Teddy looked to Keely then Lily and took a deep breath wondering if the ghosts had plans to kill them or just drive them out into the cold.


	11. Chapter 11

11

Ten girls trapped in a deserted snowbound hotel in the mountains over Sidewinder, Colorado, a tiny tourist town known for its skiing, scenery, fishing and occasional Bigfoot sighting since 1957. The winds were whistling once more, the heat cracked and expanded the AC vents as it kicked on and the freezing and contracting wood timbers holding the place together creaked and made other noises from the cold weather. Grouped together in the kitchen, they each had a bowl of Kat's homemade stew with a piece of bread and a cup of fruit cocktail or pineapple slices from a can as dessert. Alex sat quietly at the corner with Maddie at the end of the table to support Sonny still reeling from her bad dream. Lily's spoon clicked the bottom of her bowl as Keely looked up at her. Still feeling the effects of her powerful hallucination, Jessie tried to eat, but she just stirred her soup with her head still shaking and making subtle jerking motions as if she was trying to wake up from the hotel. Maddie looked to Gabriella then to Kat at the other end of the hotel. They were ten strangers bound by strange circumstances, forced caretakers to a hotel of crazy and mad ghosts trying to kill them or scare them to death. Kat pictured them floating the darkened halls of the hotel and peeking around the corners. Sonny was tired these days but scared to sleep, and Stella lifted her head from her arm balanced on the edge of the table, looked around the kitchen and sighed loudly.

"I don't know about you girls." She announced to the room. "But I need a shot." She left her empty bowl, shoved her wooden chair back and turned round past the door to the storeroom to march down the hallway off the kitchen.

"Where is she going?" Alex asked.

"She said she needed a shot." Keely's large azure eyes bobbed to and fro over them.

"Is there liquor in the place?" Teddy asked.

"Not a drop…" Alex answered.

"Then where is she going?" Lily scowled concerned.

"Guys, after what happened to Jessie, Sonny, Teddy and myself, I don't think we should be letting her wander through this place by herself." Gabriella spoke up, and they took a full second to react before breaking away to chase after Stella the way she had gone. The hall ended close to the utility hall beyond the lobby, and Teddy looked down it briefly to see Stella turning left at the far end. Notifying the others, they raced down toward her trying to catch her. Vanishing through some glass doors after her, Gabriella saw a brief image of a man in a suit toasting her pursuit as she recognized this route. This was the way to the ballroom where she'd had her experience. Even Teddy couldn't stand to be back in th this hall so soon after Phantom Alex had tried beheading her, but this time, she wasn't alone. Freezing in place after the next corner, the young brunette progeny by her side couldn't go any further.

"Gabriella…" Maddie stopped by her as Jessie then Keely raced past her calling for Stella. "What is it?"

"That's the room…" The beautiful ingénue spoke up. "That's where I had my… my incident."

Maddie looked up as the girls stormed the room. Alex rounded the room first and looked up to see Stella at the bar with a bottle of Scotch at the counter, lifting a shot glass up to her lips just as the girls came running. Sonny, Lily and Keely had slowed to admire the room and its hangar-like size, but Teddy, Kat and Alex raced to confront Stella at the counter. A light satisfied gasp from her first taste of liquor, Stella's eyes closed tiredly and her lips grinned contently before starting to pour another one just as Teddy covered her glass with her hand to prevent it.

"I thought you said there wasn't any liquor in the place." Teddy asked Alex.

"There isn't…" Alex announced. "Or there wasn't…." She recalled her first day in this place. "Stella, how did you know this was here?" Stella looked up at her as if she had woken from a trance. She looked at the bottle in her hand, realized what she was doing and hesitated.

"I don't know…" The attractive blonde seamstress looked scared. "I just… knew it was here."

"This isn't good…" Kat walked behind the counter and noticed ten bottles of champagne in a tidy row with three more bottles of scotch and three boxes of expensive bottles of beer. Foam erupted from the beer tap when she squeezed it. Up on the stage, the other girls were testing to see if the microphone worked. Out the corner of her other eye, she saw a black and white photo oddly out of place leaned up against the lighted shelves and lifted it up to her eyes. It looked like the Gold Ballroom as it looked long before the 1973 renovation. "Oh my God…" She spoke. "That… that's Jack Torrance. I recognize his face from my father's book on this place!" She showed it to the girls as Sonny came to join them.

"Fourth of July Ball, 1921?" Sonny read the inscription in the photo. "I thought you said he was here in 1979."

"I don't know" Kat lightly shook her head. "Maybe it's his grandfather, but I know his face because I thought he was kind of dashing at the time…"

"Guys…" Maddie strolled up behind Sonny. "Gabriella says we need to get out of here." They looked back to her standing in the doorway too scared to come in.

"Why?" Sonny asked.

"This is where she had her incident…" Alex looked up and called the others to get out of the room and come with them. From now on, they needed to avoid this room. Alex wasn't sure where the liquor had come from, but she speculated whoever had brought Teddy, Lily, Maddie and Keely to the hotel had dropped it off with the assistance of whatever people was helping him. A bit woozy from her one drink, Stella leaned into Kat trying to lead her out, and Alex paused with part of the felt rope taken from the room. She threaded it through the exterior handles once Lily and Keely came scurrying out of the room and tried tying it as best as she could. It wasn't an ideal barricade, but at least it reminded everyone to stay out of the ballroom. However, as she started strolling away, she heard the latches rattle from the inside of the ballroom. Not really wanting to look back, she stopped and half-heartedly peered back as the door latches rattled again, but as she stepped back to peer beyond herself back into the darkened ballroom, she saw a tall thin cadaverous bartender resembling the specter of death staring at her from beyond the room as he cleaned Stella's glass. Briefly locking eyes, Alex suddenly quickened her step and caught up with Teddy.

"See something?"

"No…" Alex shook her head and lied. "What makes you say that?"

Teddy pulled her close with a playful tug and they both grinned like friends for the first time that they could remember. Alex felt they could stay friends even after leaving this place, but then, she had become fond of all of them. She wasn't as close to these girls as she was with Harper Finkle back home, but she wanted Gabriella to introduce her to Troy, and Lily promised to show her how to surf in California. They knew they would get out of here eventually even if they had to stay here until April. Coming up on the back hall to the lobby, they had drifted a bit behind the others, but as they passed the elevators, they both heard a sound that came timed almost perfectly to their view of the lobby.

"KDK-One to KDK-Twelve… Are you receiving me?" A man's voice called out from nowhere, and both Alex and Teddy stopped smiling and froze where they were. The voice sounded oddly mechanical as if it was accompanied by static. Alex's brown eyes turned up to Teddy who looked spooked. After a period of silence, it came again.

"KDK-One to KDK-Twelve… Are you receiving me?"

"KDK?" Teddy reacted spooked. "KDK! That's the local forestry call letters!" A native of nearby Denver, she screamed with a big grin and raced to the manager's office where she saw the lights on the transmitter radio lit up in the darkened room. Flicking on the lights, Teddy grabbed the speaker box as Alex started grinning and holding her hands excitedly unable to control her glee. They were going home!

"Hello?" Teddy tried calling out on it. "Hello, can you hear me?!" She paused then recalled how to use the radio. "Over…"

"Yes, I can hear you." The man on the other side responded. "Who is this? Over…"

"Teddy… Teddy Duncan…" She and Alex were crying tears of joy and hugging each other to tell the others the good news. "I'm trapped up here at the Overlook Hotel with a bunch of other girls, and it's too cold to go down the mountain. Can you come get us? I want to go home! Over…"

"Why don't you girls go back to the ballroom and have some drinks?"

Alex's head turned to the radio unnervingly alarmed, and Teddy froze unsure how to response. How did he know they were just in the ballroom?

"Who is this?" Alex asked.

"I'm cold… Teddy, can I sleep with you tonight?" A young girl's hollow voice emerged from the radio, and Teddy's eyes rounded with fear before trying to throw the speaker box down to the floor only to bounce right up on its wire. Their joy turning to terror, Alex and Teddy scrambled from the room and back into the lobby with the sounds of two young girls giggling from the radio behind them. Teddy nearly stumbled and fell head first into the model of the hedge maze at the landing of the staircase, but Alex was there to catch her as they looked back to the hall into to the manager's office. They were completely crushed and shocked. They had gone from renewed hope and joy to sheer terror so fast. Outside the lobby, the dark blue environs of the hotel stirred with the wind blowing the snow around.

"Why are they doing this to us?" Teddy asked barely above a whisper, her crushed look of hope mirrored her exasperated fear of this place.

"Because this place makes them crazy…." Alex spoke as if she knew from experience.


	12. Chapter 12

12

It had snowed again over night. The wind had picked up and blew the flakes around in a furry. The outside hedge topiaries that had just started poking out from under the snow the day before were now covered back up, and the hedge maze itself was covered up along its long north side. Down in Sidewinder, the news advisories were reporting power outages, and police were conducting traffic under failed traffic lights, yet despite the surly natives and the grumbling locals scraping the umpteenth foot of snow off their cars and vehicles, the chatter of laughter and happy voices accompanied grammar school students building people and objects from the snowflakes. Despite this scene, no one looked up to the mountains up above Sidewinder around Mount Lee rising up above the Larimer River. No many locals spoke about the Hotel Overlook, not especially since the nasty business that had happened there since the Mafia used it in the Thirties or most recently the school teacher in 1980 who went nuts and tried decapitating his wife and son. Nowadays, they just grinned and pretended to be friendly to the paranormal investigators who came through town trying to meet the ghosts there.

During the winter, they knew the place was closed and nearly inaccessible as the deep snow blocked the long road up the mountain. Even the random hiker, hunter or ice fisherman on the Larimer River barely looked up there during the off-season, but if they did, they wouldn't suspect the small population of stranded young ladies currently presiding up there as if the vast mountain lodge was their own private sorority house. None of them peered or looked from the windows this umpteenth morning of many. The snow had reburied the entryway up to the second floor, but the other entry way was only partially covered. It took Alex several tries just to push the door open, but she eventually pushed it open wide enough for her to push her way through it. She was clad in her white sweater and long form-fitting white pants again, but this time, her clothing was splattered in several layers of red and crimson. Sonny's blood splattered her across the face, and Teddy's blood type was dripping from her hair. She had started with Gabriella in the hall, surprised Stella near the kitchen and after Sonny kept going until she had found everyone. Maddie even tried pushing her over the balcony on the third floor, but after smacking her head into the wall a few times, she never realized she had been tossed down the elevator shaft until it was too late. Dazed and confused, Alex strided out from the hotel splattered in blood and dragging the fire axe; she wasn't sure what to do with it. It had started slipping from her fingers when she dismembered Lily, but it was now sticking to her fingers since she had impaled Kat in the lobby on the broken chair.

Striding forward down the front drive, her legs sinking a foot and a half through the snow, Alex knew she had to get to town and tell everyone what she had did. Someone had to come pick up her friends' bodies from the Overlook now that their spirits had joined the place. Dazed and confused, the former sorceress just stared down the direction of the long drive down the mountain. Her breath freezing into mist before her, her bloodied clothes freezing the fabrics to her skin, Alex sniffled a bit as the cold ravaged her lungs. She was already feeling the pangs of pneumonia hitting her with the forefront of a runny nose and the early pangs of a headache taking over her head. Still dragging the axe, she had scraped a long line in the snow and ice as she reached the tree line. When she looked down to the first bend in the road ahead of her, she heard a car coming from nowhere. Someone was coming to meet her…

Midway down the incline, Alex heard the brakes of a 1967 Chevrolet Impala braking and coming to a stop. It was dark blue in color, almost black… Sam Winchester raised up out of the passenger side first, his brother, Dean, coming up after hitting the brake and placing the car in park to grab their rifle.

"Alex… stop where you are!" Dean screamed to her with worried concern. "We know what happened!"

"I killed them…." Alex was crying and she marched down in the snow. "I couldn't stop myself…" She was ashamed of what she had done.

"Put the axe down!" Sam yelled at her.

"I couldn't stand staying there another day…" Alex bawled, her emotions pouring from her heart. "The same faces… day after day after day…"

"We know, Alex…" Dean watched her coming closer. "Just drop the axe!"

"But I'm free…." Alex's hair was sticking and drying from the blood in her into a hard shell around her head. "They're free…"

"Alex, drop the axe… Please…" Sam started coming closer to her coming down the snow-covered incline.

"We're free now…."

"I know, Alex…" Sam started reaching for her. She had to be frozen by now. Her nose was running, and she was shaking and trembling, but some of it could have been from the shock of what she had done. He started reaching to take the bloody axe from her sticky fingers…

"You can't make me go back!" She screamed at the tall dashing figure before her and swung the axe at him, but Dean's finger flinched on the rifle, and she felt the front of her face going out through the back of her head through in a splatter of bone, brain tissue and liquefied blood spraying around as her body flailed around in a nearly complete circle and dropped her into the pink snow. The shock of witnessing her death forced her awake, and Alex woke up with stunned alarm. Sonny sat on the edge of her bed pulling on the same hotel loafers they all had been wearing in the hotel. Maddie and Gabrielle were talking and giggling in the outer room. Stella had come up eating from a bowl of pineapple chunks taken a can.

"I'm out of the bathroom." Sonny looked trustingly to Alex. "Teddy dropped off some fresh towels…"

"Yeah…." Slowly sliding from bed and pushing her feet to the floor, Alex reacted numb and scared of her thoughts. That wasn't her… she could never kill anyone. She might have teased Justin or turned Max into her little sister in the past, but she knew she couldn't kill anyone… at least that's what she told herself. Her pulse racing, her heart still pounding, she tried to get herself back to normal. When she showered her body scent off, she felt she was still trying to clean off imaginary blood. Was she pre-destined to kill everyone around her? Was that what the hotel was doing? Was she somehow unconsciously conjuring these girls to her to kill them? Lily could hear her crying briefly in the bathroom when she came looking for her, but she tried to ignore it when they went down together to join the others.

The scents of eight more chicken fryers filled the kitchen downstairs and became what was known as breakfast, lunch and dinner for the day. They were easier to cook and smaller to handle than any of the larger chunks of meat in the freezer, but as much as everyone wanted something other than chicken, no one wanted to bother with the mess with cooking anything over twelve pounds, like a roast or a turkey. Anyone wanting to cook for themselves in the kitchen was free to go for it. Sitting next to Kat, Jessie smelled the sweet odor from the hotel shampoo filling her senses and looked up next to Sonny by her. She had reheated the last of the soup from the other day, making it more like vegetable soup in a beef broth with another can of vegetables. Several of the others ate chicken and dropped their bones into their plates. The sound of teeth cracking on tough chicken meat and the smacking of lips on the soft meat filled the air as they gathered once again en mass to discuss the previous week's events and compose a list of notes to keep each other aware of in the Overlook.

"Okay…" Sonny was eating fruit cocktail from a can poured into a bowl. "What all do we have on the list?"

"Creepy little girls, phantom bands, spirits that look like us and people we know…" Keely had transcribed the list from their experiences.

"A cursed train room…" Jessie made a face showing she was tired of this place.

"An undead audience, nightmares…" Keely looked up. "Is there any place in this hotel where we're safe?"

"Oh-oh-oh…" Alex cleaned her hands of the chicken with paper towels. "Phantom housekeepers…. My first day here, I trashed that hall right over there…" She pointed beyond Stella and Maddie to the hall alongside the lobby beyond the row of glass doors. "And something not only cleaned up the broken glass, but replaced the shattered glass in the photos returned to the wall."

"Is such a thing possible?" Jessie asked Kat.

"I've heard of ghosts leaving footprints and imbibing the occasional glass of sherry…" Kat tossed her vibrant head of long dark hair back. "But I have never heard of phantom housekeepers or repairmen…" She looked back to Jessie. "At least not on that scale… but…" She sighed tiredly amidst her haunted group of white-clad sorority sisters. "Look, at this point, it's not just ghosts getting to us. This place is getting into our heads as well…" She paused still trying to make sense of this place. "There is a reason this place stopped using seasonal caretakers. The location, the setting, the loneliness, the same constant faces every day… one of us is going to snap, and when it happens, I don't want to be here."

Alex looked away discreetly.

"Could that be why we're here?" Maddie decided she had enough chicken and placed her plate down. "To take us to the brink of insanity then… document it?"

"I think at this point that even a sociology experiment into the paranormal would have stopped." Gabriella spoke up. "I mean… Sonny's heart almost stopped…" She gestured one by one to each girl. "Jessie came close to a nervous breakdown, Lily nearly froze to death outside trying to run from this place, Kat had to break out of a bathroom before she was scalded to death, I was terrified for my life from something I will never get out of my head, and we're all having bad dreams. I think we need to find a way to expedite our freedom from this place. Like smoke signals or… fireworks… someone in town has to know we're up here."

"Why would you trash a hall?" Teddy looked at her with puzzled confusion.

"Because the phantom operator wouldn't transfer my call…" Alex glared at Teddy as if she was starting something, but Teddy backed down and looked around to Gabriella, Sonny, Maddie and the other girls trapped with them in this place.

"There is one thing I've noticed about this place." Gabriella had placed bits of her chicken into a bowl of chicken and noodles she had heated up from a can. "This place always seems get to one of us when we're alone." She looked around the other nine faces sitting in the circle. "Why can't we create a buddy system that none of us are never apart for something to happen?"

No one immediately started talking. It sounded like a reasonable solution, but they all gradually started agreeing with each other. Alex and Sonny had already been bonding as friends, Maddie and Gabriella and Keely and Lily had been getting close in their groups of two. Agreeing separately, they each started founding new ways to tolerate this place.

"Didn't some once say something about a transmitter?" Lily still didn't want here after her nightmare last night. "Where are we on that?"

"Still not getting a signal…" Gabriella confessed. Alex and Teddy shared further secret furtive glances.

"Are you using it right?"

"There's only about so many ways you can use it." Gabriella answered Lily. They heard the wind whip up again outside the hotel howling over the roof and over its eaves and garrets. The ten girls drew silently nervous to be at the mercy of the natural and the supernatural, tapped in the line between two worlds.

"Look…" Teddy spoke up. "This is a hotel. It has to have everything a guest could want, and that means it has to have snow supplies. I really think we should be finding supplies to hike down the mountain."

"Where do you think we should look?" Alex cracked opened her second can of soda and lifted the carbonated drink to her lips.

"A basement?"

"You mean the downstairs laundry room or the loading dock beneath the kitchen." Teddy rationalized. "Come on, we've been running loose in the place for almost a month… taking over rooms, exploring offices, free-loading, breaking into every nook and cranny… Where have we not been yet?"

"The attic?" Jessie answered.

Looking at each other over and again, they all started breaking apart separately leaving their dishes, silverware and trash in chairs, on tables and windowsills and hidden in plants as they lined up in pairs and apart to take the stairs from the lobby. If as Alex claimed there was a phantom force keeping the place neat and tidy, they were going to exploit it, but taking the stairs made them realize that attic access would not be available to the guests. It had to be from one of the third floor employee access corridors, but all they found was that the place had a fourth floor as well. Teddy and Kat had taken off together through the utility hall looking for supplies they could use and found the garage for the snowmobiles. It was empty, but they were already rationalizing things to do with the tools and leftover parts. In the fourth floor corridor in the hall off the staircase to the hotel apartments, Maddie and Gabriella found a spiral staircase off the hall that seemed separate from the rest of the hotel. It went up into the coned roof over the lobby on the top of the place. The door up top was smaller, and more crampt, but it wasn't locked, and they broke into the room with barely any effort.

"Whoa…" Lily followed Maddie and Keely with Sonny leading the way. They were definitely in the ancient timber rafters of the hotel and walking a dusty wooden floor that they were not meant to find. Each section of the hotel was separated as another room with the eaves stacked with boxes or made into caged off areas to store old out-dated hotel files. Illuminated by single light bulbs hanging freely from the think wood beams, Gabriella peeked into a box marked Christmas supplies, and Sonny noticed the dusty cases of band instruments and recalled her encounter. One section looked caged off to hold and preserve the old files of the hotel. Jessie and Stella found old guest books, stacks of dried yellow newspapers and boxes of the hotel going back to the Forties and Fifties. Alex poked through old trunks and pulled out albums of newspaper clippings and framed photos of hotel events. There were old decorations, the remains of stuffed animals that at one time must have decorated the place and on high shelves over head level, several pieces of luggage left behind by forgetful guests. Sonny fretted about finding mice or rats, but Gabriella mentioned that she didn't see any droppings to suggest there were any small animals. Jessie turned a corner and found a doorway in the end wall at the end of the corner. The door wasn't locked and it didn't seem to be barred in anyway. She twisted the knob and swung the door open.

"Girls…" Jessie stood and looked back to the seven other ransacking girls looting the attic. "You won't believe what I found!" She swung the door open further to a deep fifty-foot long hall with a pitched ceiling filled with discarded clothing. The floor was covered in a foot deep of layered forgotten clothing scattered on the floor, the sides lined with racks of dresses and evening gowns not yet disturbed. It looked like a giant closet for some very messy girls. A few pieces hung sloppily over the wood beams of the roof or were left tossed into garret windows. A few of the racks had been pulled into the center of the room and left discarded where they had been placed. They were all in different colors, styles and time periods; some of the gowns were even quite slinky and revealing.

"I'm a size fourteen…" Someone echoed and they stormed the room like children in a candy store clearing a path and disturbing dust pulling up and pillaging the giant clothes closet looking for attire to fill their personal closets. Some of the worst pieces looked at if they were from the psychedelic Sixties or the swinging Seventies. Maddie found a pair of blue jeans in her size, and Gabriella and Lily posed in front of each other of long evening gowns. Stella sneezed several times from the dust they were stirring up.

"What do you think this room is?" Keely was the furthest into the room lifting up blouses and skirts trying to fashion complete outfits.

"It must be the dressing room for the ball room entertainment." Stella guessed as she lifted a baroquely designed full-figure dress.

"Three floors up?" Lily raced around looking for stuff close to her size.

"You think there's a room full of shoes and accessories?" Sonny giggled in her easiest clothes-shopping spree ever.

"I'm not wearing anything until I gently wash it first. "A wad of clothes over her arm, Jessie had found a high-heeled shoe with an ankle strap and was digging around for its twin. "Where did you say the washing machines were?"

"Down the hall beyond the ballroom and down the stairs…" Alex noticed Maddie had gone to check the next door on the far wall. "What's there?"

"Another stairwell and another door…" Maddie called back.

"What's in it?" Lily called across the attic. Tossing her armful of blouses, pants, gowns and dresses into the blank spot by the door, Maddie stepped through and strided across a top landing. Through the doorway, they watched Maddie open the door to the next section of the attic, step through and pull on the light switch. Standing still, the remaining seven waited for her return. It took her a few extra seconds for her to return, but she eventually came back toward them dusting cobwebs out of her hair and sneezing from more dust.

"Boxes…" She sneezed again. "Air-conditioning filters, cleaning supplies and stacks of sheets and blankets in plastic wrap…" She sneezed again from the ground wood dust from the rafters filling her nose.

"We still have more attic to explore…" Gabriella looked around with a flapper's feathered headdress on her head. She found a man's fedora on the floor and placed it on Keely who started posing with it. Intermixed in the clothes on the floor were other things like undergarments, old hosiery from the Forties and the old-style corsets and bras from the Sixties. They were raiding someone's messy closet storage, but whoever owned this women's attic department of clothes and attire was obviously long gone and not coming back.

"Why do you think the hotel dumped all these clothes to the floor instead of hanging them?" Stella had dumped a box empty of its contents to fill up with everything she was taking with her from this room.

"Maybe we're not the first girls to trash this room for free clothes…" Maddie was carting her free wardrobe out in a suitcase she had found in the window. Almost everyone by now was reaching their limit on what they could carry. Alex was still grabbing stuff. Gabriella and Jessie were still searching for interesting items. Alex stopped to pause and think about what she had said. Could this be evidence of cycles of girls brought here, abandoned and left to kill each other?

"Whoa, this place is dusty…" Jessie sneezed and noticed someone else in the room. She looked like Alex with white skin and much shorter hair dressed as a flapper from the 1920s with a feathered headdress. Transparent and nearly immaterial, she sneaked to the distant open door Maddie had left open and looked around to the girls searching the room for extra clothes and attire and accessories, grinned secretly to Jessie with her finger held lightly to her lips to be quiet and vanished into the light unseen as if she was glad to be released from the room.


	13. Chapter 13

13

Something stirred Sonny awake from her sleep. Opening her eyes from a deep sleep, she scowled, rubbed her eyes and checked the alarm clock by the bed. It was three thirty-three. Alex was still deep asleep next to her in her room. Blinking a few times, Sonny yawned and assumed the position to drift back asleep, flipping her pillow to the cooler side and reconfiguring her arm under it. She had missed her concert date, and thinking about it made her eyes fill with tears. What was she doing here? She wasn't stranded on an island. She wasn't a plane crash victim on a mountain, and she wasn't wandering the desert looking for water. She was snowbound in a strange hotel filled with ghosts. Had the circumstances been more rational, she wouldn't be here. It wasn't as if she had come here to go skiing and then was told the mountain pass was out and she'd be stuck here a while. Someone who knew this place was remote and deserted for six months out of the year had dumped her here? Could her assistant Marcie be behind it? Could Roland her security guard have been paid off as she was placed in a casket, shipped here and then left in the room of this hotel with Alex, Maddie and Gabriella. She didn't know any of these girls a year ago. How could she be sure Alex was not actually a part of it? She sounded genuine, but how did she know? One girl left to live here by herself, okay? Three more girls five days later, possible. Kat and herself two days later, maybe… But Teddy, Keely, Stella and Lily in one night two nights later? That required at least two people for each of them to undress each of them, redress them, place them each in a room with a wardrobe of identical white outfits with the hotel logo and then slip back out without being seen. It sounded possible, but it was so far-fetched. What was the reason? What was the motive? If this coven of abductors was carrying away young women with a certain attraction factor, why dump them here? How could they get in and out and down the mountain so easy while they couldn't? Was there possibly a helicopter-landing pad in the premises?

The phantom drummer on the third floor started up again. He drummed up his advance percussion beat in the overhead room and struck up the band once more. Cocking her head, Sonny grimaced with uncertainty to realize it was starting again. The phantom marching band was at it again. She rolled over and started shaking Alex awake.

"Alex…" She shook her by the arm. "Alex!" The brunette Waverly Place princess wouldn't stir, meanwhile the marching started again on the same route as last time, marching out of the room and descending the stairwell outside of the room.

"Alex…" Sonny opined regrettably that her new best friend could not wake to hear the sounds of the marching band upstairs. Her face contorted with frustrated fear, Sonny lamented her fate as the solitary witness to the drums, horns and marching coming down blaring outside the room and raced to catch them in the act. Maybe it was ruse for her abductors to keep sneaking their victims into rooms in the Overlook, or maybe it really was a phantom band of decaying ectoplasmic musicians trying to keep from getting bored. Sonny leapt to her feet and charged through her apartment on her way to the hallway, throwing open the door and catching view of a murder scene.

Teddy lay dead and bludgeoned at the stairs in a pool of her blood, and Gabriella was left lying at the floor outside the door, mouth open in chock and twitching from her attack. The walls were marked in blood, the residue of it coated part of the railing where someone had been pushed over to her death. Standing over Lily at the far side, Alex stood dripping and chopping her to bits with an axe. Realizing she was being watched, she stopped and turned toward Sonny watching her, lifting the axe to her shoulder and peered back with a sticky mound of her long tresses covering up one side of her red-spotted face marred by her murder spree. Trembling in shock, Sonny screamed and jumped backward into the steps up into her room. The lights went on as Jessie sat up in her single bed. Maddie and Gabriella had pushed it out for her after taking a big bed from one of the other rooms. They started rushing from their room, and Alex woke from her forced slumber. The vision had vanished, but the shock of seeing it was still heavy in Sonny's mind.

"Sonny?!" Maddie came after her crawling on the floor. "Sonny?"

"She's going to kill us!" Sonny was screaming. "Alex is going to kill us!" They all looked to Alex standing next to them on the landing. She was stunned speechless and shaking her head. Was Sonny sharing in her bad dreams now? Within minutes, Teddy had come from the end of the hall to find out what was going on, and hear what had happened. Sonny described what she had seen and said she wanted to move to yet another room in the hotel to sleep. She no longer wanted the apartment, and neither Jessie, Maddie nor even Gabriella wanted to stay in it alone so it meant moving further away from the lobby to other rooms. Eventually Sonny apologized to Alex for the accusation, and calmed enough to stay the rest of the night in her initial room, but she was not staying another night under the phantom band from upstairs. By morning and the rays of sunlight, the hotel seemed less haunted, and the girls forced to live in it were once again feeling safe to traverse the halls.

"For two hundred rooms in this place…" Keely remarked. "We're running out of rooms…" She told Lily. They had heard the story Sonny had described of her vision from Teddy when she had returned to their room, but with the brunette members of their party vacating that space, Lily wanted to try it out for one night in case phantom Miley returned carrying her head under her arm.

"I'm really starting to hate this place…" Lily confessed as they strolled as casually as possible down the hall for the kitchen to find something for breakfast. "I'd really prefer to freeze to death on the mountain to getting the crap scared out of me by crazy ghosts…"

"You don't think…" Keely looked to her with big beautiful blue azure eyes strained with worry. "The ghosts are trying to drive one of crazy enough to kill each other, do you?"

"You had to say it…" Lily mumbled. "You had to say it…" She took a few steps and stopped. "Oh god… what if the clothes we found belonged to other girls slaughtered here before us?"

"Suddenly I'm much more concerned over whether I used enough detergent…" Keely mumbled and turned her head to the rustling noise. Someone was moving around in Room 202 over the lobby. It was right next to the room Maddie and Gabriella had stayed in to watch the front entrance for their abductors. First they thought it might be the ghosts, but then they wondered if this was where Sonny had moved to after last night. Stepping back, they listened as the doorknob rattled and turned and a hazel-eyed beauty they didn't recognize strolled out wearing the hotel's monogrammed white t-shirt with the regular white form-fitting pants. It was happening again... another new face in the hotel, only this time, she looked exactly how they remembered the entertainer known as Kelly Clarkson. Her hair was back to wild brunette brown, exactly how it looked when she won her recording contact on American Idol in 2001 instead of the wavy blonde locks she had changed it to in recent years. She also looked leaner and curvier, nothing like the modern singer who often struggled with her weight and confessed openly to having a hard time keeping her size down to a manageable level. Looking hot and attractive, she stood outside her room in the same white attire everyone else in this hotel was wearing and looked up to Lily and Keely coming toward her suddenly jumping and squealing in excited female idol worship.

"Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" The two squealed and jumped up and down star-struck in excitement and got her to stop before them. "Miss Clarkson!" Keely caught her breath first unable to stop smiling. "I am such a big fan! Your song, "Catch My Breath," is like a personal anthem of mine. Every time I hear it I have to stop what I'm doing to listen to it."

"Kelly…" Lily tried to play it cool. "I'm Lily… Miley's friend. You probably remember me best as Lola Lufnagle back when Miley was still calling herself Hannah Montana… We met at Taylor Swift's birthday party in Malibu."

"I'm sorry…" The girl smirked considering pretending to be the singer again to make their day then changed her mind. "But I'm not Kelly Clarkson. I just seem to get that a lot."

Lily and Keely lost part of their excitement and looked at each other.

"Yes, you are…" Lily insisted. "We've met five times…"

"Sorry…" The confused brunette shook her head and continued looking through the hall aimlessly for someone she knew, knocking at the door of the empty room next to hers and calling for her parents. Lily dropped her jaw feeling a bit snubbed, and Keely reacted a bit perturbed by the confusion. The girl looked so much like Kelly that there was no mistaking her. They watched her heading down the hallway.

"Well, see if I download your next Top Forty hit…" Lily gasped and headed the other way to see what there would be for breakfast.

Back in the hallway outside Room 237, Alex and Sonny had checked out Suite 238 and hoped the morbid history of the suite next door hadn't touched it. Neither of them wanted to be alone, and Gabriella, Maddie and Jessie were going to try it with Kat in Sonny's old apartment. Leary of ghosts for the time, they had searched the room tirelessly looking for possible hidden cameras and microphones for the umpteenth time in case they were being watched, checking the lights, air vents, furniture, bathroom and every part of the room, but they were still not convinced the room was clear. There had to be a reason they were in this hotel to live apart from the world.

"Seems clear…" Alex headed out with Sonny behind her. "We just need to get our clothes"

"I hate these outfits." Sonny mumbled under breath as they departed the suite for breakfast. "If someone was going to leave us clothes, you'd thing they'd have given us a better variety."

"I try not to worry about it…" Alex was not as picky about what had been left for her. "Besides, we got all that neat stuff from the attic in the downstairs washing machines, and we're probably going to be here for five more months until the hotel opens, and we're found." She and Sonny strided down the hall to the elevators. "And then we'll be the hotel's problem… and whoever decided to desert us here."

"Do you really think this is some sort of social experiment?" Sonny asked and hit the button for the first floor.

"I don't know what to think." Alex sighed and lightly shook her head. "Every time I think I have a grasp on what's happening, something…" She heard the door of Suite 236 behind them open and a beautiful regal looking redhead with long vibrant curly locks emerge and close the door behind her. They had not seen this girl before her in this hotel. She was completely new. It was happening again. More attractive young girls were waking up in the hotel for the first time and dressing in the clothes left for them to stroll out and get answers. Clad in the same white attire as themselves, the tall beauty reacted unsure and disconcerted emerging from the room, but then she saw Alex and Sonny at the elevators and composed herself to approach them with the proper decorum to approach strangers.

"Ladies…" She held her head up regally as a victim of her wealthy background. "Might you direct me to which room of the hospital I might find Jack Dawson?"

Alex and Sonny looked at each other and dropped their mouths open speechlessly as the same time the elevator doors opened to the floor.

"This isn't a hospital…" Alex informed her. "It's a hotel."

"I see…" The cultured redhead was a bit confused. "Well, I guess an Iceland hotel would be the best place for the other survivors…" She looked up and down the hall. "Might you direct me to the hotel lobby?"

"Down the stairs, bear right and keep going forward…" Sonny directed the lost princess.

"Thank you…" She reached to take Sonny's hand and briefly hesitated. "Rose Dawson…" She introduced herself with a light smile.

"Sonny Monroe… Alex Russo…" Sonny introduced herself and Alex with a bit less emphasis on etiquette. Unused to wearing her new attire, Rose thanked them with a light bow and turned to find her male companion in the location. The younger ladies were both stunned and confused. They had reached the point they knew to expect new random faces of girls appearing here, but where did she get the idea they were in Iceland? Was it because of the endless snow outside, and why would she think she was in a hospital? Survivors of what? They stepped into the elevator before it closed.

"I am not getting used to this place at all!" Alex discomfited with exasperated frustration.

"What the hell is with this place?" Sonny spoke too quickly.

"Better question…" Alex mumbled. "Where the hell are we?" The doors opened behind them to the Colorado Lounge on the first floor as another strange girl they didn't recognize looked behind herself to them and hurried out of the way. There were several new girls in the hotel this morning, more than a few... maybe alost fifty, all of them wearing a combination of white sweaters or t-shirts with white pants, and they were all crisscrossing and gathering in the room confused and unprepared and asking questions. Where were they? What was this place? How did they get here? Did anyone have a cell phone? Whatever was happening around them and to them had multiplied last night and then doubled. They recognized Stella wandering around another shorter thinner redhead, and Kat came down the stairs stopped twice by a mature older woman of more demure attraction and then by another young girl with bright blonde hair. No one knew what was happening or how they had got here. All they knew so far was that they had woken up in a strange room in a non-familiar hotel surrounded by strangers.

"Holy crap on a cracker…" Alex saw several new faces. "It looks like our abductor hit the jackpot last night!"

"Alex!" Jessie and Maddie came running from around the corner to the employee corridor. They looked over-wrought and about to have a nervous breakdown. They didn't want to be here, but right now, all they had each other. "Someone must have broke a wall down some where because suddenly we're from a population of ten to almost a hundred!"

"Did we unleash something from breaking into the attic?" Sonny wondered aloud. "I feel as if we're in an episode of "Lost." The snowbound version…"

"What do you want me to do?" Alex did not want to be the leader to this forced female community or the blame of the kidnapping ring gone out of control. "Send everyone home? Quite frankly, I want to be the first one to go!"

"Look!" Maddie was hysterical. "I don't mind pitching in and helping with the cooking, even with Teddy and Jessie helping, but I am not taking responsibility for feeding a entire hotel!"

"It looks like the Christian Church version of the Playboy Mansion." Jessie quipped looking around. Several of the members of the sudden female population seemed to be speculating what was happening. A few thought they like others had been booked into hotels on their retinue, but then they all started noticing they were all left the same type of clothes to wear and realizing something odd was happening. No one had a strict body type or hairstyle. While everyone looked to be in the early twenties to mid-thirties age range, everyone in the room was dressed in the same white attire as Alex and the earlier girls. Unless someone did something, things were going to be getting bad very quickly…

"Could this be happening because we broke into the attic?" Maddie repeated Sonny's query. "Did we unleash something?"

"Excuse me…" Zoe Brooks from Pacific Coast Academy in California crossed before them. "I'm looking for Chase Matthews… He's got big blue eyes, brown hair, a smile that melts butter…"

"He sounds just dreamy!" Jesse started shining.

"Seriously!" Alex tried snapping her back to reality with the mystery before them. Turning around exasperated and frustrated, Alex sighed close to Maddie and mumbled under her breath. "Could this situation get any more bizarre…"

"Tricia! Nikki!" The Kelly Clarkson look-alike now appeared on the balcony over them, looked down to Sonny and Alex and started racing down past two more other girls on the stairs to get to them in a hurry. The two of them reacted confused, somehow they were going to be confused with someone else; it was a sort of a pattern to the madness by sticking all these strange girls together in one place to encounter each other. They all looked like someone to someone else. Kelly rushed up to Sonny and Alex, hugged them and came to a stop before them.

"I can't find mom or dad anywhere in this place." She looked at Sonny and Alex and reacted as confused as the others. "Why are we all wearing the same thing?"

"Kelly…" Sonny knew Kelly Clarkson from a concert tour with her. "What are you talking about?"

"Kelly?" The girl looked to Maddie. "Maddie, what's going on here?"

"You know me?" Maddie was awestruck!

"You've only been my little sister for almost twenty years…" Lainey Collins looked around the room grateful to have found some faces she recognized. Tricia was her twin sister and the spitting image of Sonny, Maddie and Gabrielle were her young sisters, named exactly like these girls, and Nikki and Lisa her baby sisters looked exactly like Alex and Jessie. They all went to school at Collinsport High School in Maine where they drove the boys crazy, and their parents even more frantic. Maddie had been named for the candy girl at the Tipton Hotel who used to baby-sit her as a little girl when her parents lived in Boston, but Maddie Fitzpatrick was apparently unaware of that connection just yet. She looked to Sonny and Alex with stunned surprise, but Lainey hung near the girls for the moment because they looked identical to her siblings, but none of the girls recognized her except for her semblance to a certain American Idol alumni.

"Please don't tell me there's someone else in the world who looks like me!" Alex reached up as if she had a headache.

"Wait, there's mom!" Lainey cried out and pointed across the room.

"Mom?" Sonny reacted and watched Lainey hurry over to a petite blonde beauty wandering confused through the room. Much like the other girls, the woman wasn't sure where she was or who all these other younger were. One minute, she was struggling to get to sleep for the early shift at the hospital, and next thing she knew she was waking up in a strange hotel room with white clothes in her closet. It seemed to be the same confusing predicament for all these girls by the looks and the sounds of these conversations. Some girls were still wandering the hotel, others found their way to the lobby area and were told that others were coming here looking for answers. Lainey confronted the woman.

"Mom, where's dad?"

"I'm sorry…" The beleaguered woman turned and looked around trying to rationalize this predicament. "I'm not who you think I am…" She turned around trying to find answers as to why she had wakened up in this place with no memories of having arrived here or checking in to this place. Dana Harridge hung near lawyer Georgia Thomas because she resembled her sister. Kristin Baxter came hurrying down the stairs of the balcony happy to find others, and Lindsay Munroe used her analytic detective skills from the New York forensics lab to realize no one knew why they were here, much less how they got here. Fresh from Omega Beta Zeta sorority at Windsor College in Ohio, college student Cici Cooper also looked for answers no one had or could answer. Another young student from Hollywood Arts High School named Tori Vega was wondering how she got spirited from her home to this winter resort. She wandered past another perplexed beauty named Hermione Granger, an attractive prodigy who glanced confusingly through the room at her practically "mystical" relocation to this place without her own special abilities. There were young girls around her at about her age looking for hotel staff, there were older women here too, maybe thirty to thirty-five or even forty years of age, but it was quite obvious, it was nothing but women and they all were comparatively attractive with some looks and they had all been left the same range of attire in their rooms. Something very weird was going on here, and Alex, Sonny, Maddie and Jessie with the others could only watch in nervous anxiety. How could their mysterious problem escalate so fast and so massive? It became obvious they were not dealing with mortal abductors unless there was an organization of them in the hundreds using this hotel…

"Mom?" Lainey's baby doll face took on a sheer amount of terrified fear and worry to be alone that she clung a few feet close to her mother's duplicate scared and unsure where to go. Liz Masterson looked back at the panicked young girl as a red-haired college student named Lily Finnerty mouthed off at her for bumping into her. This girl was petrified so far from home. She couldn't stand to leave her abandoned after she had latched on to her as a mother figure. Gasping and turning back around, Lizzie beamed to take her under her protection and took the girl close hugging her close as Alex and the others watched. Were they mother and daughter? Someone had to do something. Rose Dawson had drifted into the room behind Teddy and Kat by now. It was very apparently no one was getting any answers. Someone had to take charge!

"Excuse me?"

"No, I don't work here…"

"Excuse me?"

"I don't know anything."

"What?" Lizzie looked around. "Good grief!" She stepped from the floor on to a table to get her voice above all the others and blew a whistle through her fingers that caught the attention of the room. Everyone suddenly stopped talking and wandering around and looked up to her.

"Ladies…" She got their attention. She beamed charmingly around their lovely and attractive faces as everyone slowly one by one turned to face her. "Hello… My name is Dr. Elizabeth Masterson, and I am the head of emergencies at St. Thomas Hospital in Detroit… Now, who's in charge here?"

Anyone who knew Alex and had been here more than a few days suddenly pointed to Alex, Maddie, Jessie and Sonny huddled out of the way in a secret conversation at the bottom of the stairs near the elevators. One by one, everyone started turning to face Alex and her posse of friends. Maddie was first to notice all eyes on them then Alex noticed as well. They were not running a hotel for other abduction victims, but now it looked like they had no choice.

"You've got to be kidding me…" Alex mumbled under a silent hundred eyes on her.

"Alex, you have to say something!" Sonny encouraged her.

"You can't make me!"

"Alex…" Maddie faced her. "You're the only one who knows more about what's happening here than anyone else."

"Crap and a half…" Alex wished she had her magic to vanish and forced herself to be responsible. It was a lot harder now that she knew was could be blamed for what riot might happen here. A few girls imprisoned in a desolate hotel were hard to believe, but almost a hundred? This was inconceivable. In her way, artist Lizzie McGuire and Chicago socialite Jackie Burkhart parted the way on the steps as Maddie, Sonny and Jessie followed Alex up the stairs to lend her support and stop on the landing over the piano. Dancer Chelsea Daniels turned around to see her as writer Sabrina Spellman and actress Penny Parker came closer. College student Lily Finnerty glanced around the room past party planner Molly McCleish looking for a familiar face, and antique collector Melinda Gordon wandered confused into the room. Stewardess Amelia Warren had been plucked from her nap on a plane over France. How did she get off the plane? How did she turn up here? No one knew anything, and it had become quiet enough to hear the mountain winds blowing the snow around beyond the hotel. Jessie counted the numerous heads and faces turning to face them, and Sonny and Alex shared a look as if they had been friends for longer than their time together. The one thing these numerous ladies all had in common besides their attire was that they were all women and each of them in their own ways were attractive or physically appealing in form. Journalist Topanga Lawrence looked up and around confused and perturbed with interior decorator Kelly Kapowski slipping up in front of Manhattan lawyer Christine Sullivan and restaurateur Prue Halliwell.

"Hello…" Alex gasped nervously on the landing over the piano. "My name is Alex Russo. I'm from New York City. You're possibly wondering what's going on here, and to tell the truth…" She looked to Lainey near Dr. Masterson then to Teddy on the far balcony and Rose in the archway down under her. "I really have no idea…" She paused as light whispers and gossip slipped unheard.

"I can tell you what I do know…" Alex forced herself to continue. "We are now in the Overlook Hotel, a hotel in the Colorado Rockies that is only open six months out of the year because of how treacherous the road is during the winter. We are here now during the winter months during the time it is abandoned. Why? I don't know. By whom? I have no idea."

Lainey made a face realizing Alex was not her sister Nikki and realized just how alone she was here among these strangers.

"I was here alone by myself for five days until Jessie, Maddie and Gabriella suddenly appeared out of no where…" Alex continued. "Sonny and Kat appeared two days later, and two days later, Lily, Teddy, Stella and Keely… I have no idea how they much less myself got here, but I'm so glad they are here otherwise I might have killed myself than deal with the loneliness. I'm so sorry you're all here, but I don't have any idea how we got here or how to get us out of here.

"My best rational explanation, pure and simple is… abduction…" Alex continued. "One person… or a team of people working together… have deserted us here to live in the hotel until it reopens in the spring… but why? I don't know." She now got a multitude of voices and queries and ladies talking and overlapping. They all had jobs, families, responsibilities they had to get to in their lives. This was not a plane crash where they were forced to survive – this was a coerced forced vacation.

"Wait, wait, wait…" Penny Parker, a blonde struggling actress from Pasadena, California, looked up to Alex from her left and spoke up. "We've been abandoned here? Someone has a cell phone right?" She looked around.

"If someone has a cell phone, " Alex spoke up to their angry and cofused faces. "Get a message out and get us out of here, but I'm pretty sure no here is going to be left with any communication devices."

"What's a cell phone?" Jackie Burkhart turned to Lizzie McGuire.

"You're kidding, right?"

"What about the land line?" Crimson-hared Olive Pendergast from the University of California in Los Angeles looked up. "Internet access?"

"For all we know…" Gabriella spoke up. "The snow has knocked out the phones, and the hotel has no Internet access, but we do have a transmitter radio on the premises and we're still trying to get a signal on it, but with the mountains..."

"What's an Internet?" Jackie annoyed Lizzie again.

"Where are you from? The 70s?"

"How the hell can someone sneak in and out of here to leave us here and not get caught?" Twenty-year old Sabrina Spellman stood up on a table. Her mystical powers as a witch had left her as well. Hermione and Sara Bailey, a school psychologist from San Francisco, California were in the same predicament. The only person with any out-standing ability was Melinda Gordon from Grandview, Pennsylvania, and as she looked around the room, she saw figures she knew were ghosts. Two girls in blue dresses looked at her and wandered off, a male figure with a thin mustache in deep pallor who was wearing a tuxedo lifted his drink to toast her and on the balcony over Alex, three ladies dressed as flappers from the Twenties stood watching over the balcony at the invasion of the living to their hotel. It was a scant few, but she felt so many others here…

"Trust me…" Alex stared at Sabrina. "I have been asking that question since we got here."

"I'm hungry…" Plucked from South Connecticut State University, which she attended to be near her boyfriend at Yale, Lily Finnerty felt a bit overwhelmed to be surrounded by all these attractive women, but if she was included, maybe someone thought she was good enough to be included with them. Denise Sherwood, the wife of Colonel Frank Sherwood of Camp Marshall in South Carolina looked at her and raised her hand.

"Alex, honey…" She responded concerned and earnest. "We do have food here, right?"

"We have a fully stocked pantry and freezers with food." Maddie answered the question. "But I am not experienced to cook for a hundred people."

"Fifty-eight…" Gabriella corrected her.

"Fifty-eight…"

"Does anyone here have restaurant experience?" Christine looked toward the crowd.

"Crap and a half…" Someone cursed behind Sabrina and Hermione. "I run a soup kitchen in Nantucket." Helen Chapel rolled her eyes from under her blonde locks. "Can I have five volunteers and about an hour to get something prepared?" There were a few whispers as Denise offered to help and Maddie, Teddy and Jessie joined in to show the way to the kitchen. The daughter of a wine-maker in the San Fernando Valley, Hallie Parker relented to help as well. By now, Melinda drifted forward closer to Alex.

"Alex…" The buxom beauty looked up from her long tresses of dark brown hair. "There's something about this place you haven't told us, isn't there?" She looked over to the phantom of the stout balding phantom of a middle-aged man only she could see.

"Yeah…" Alex groaned reluctant to tell.

"The place is haunted…" Kat spoke up.

"Way to confess, Kat…" Alex looked annoyed at her, but now the whisperings really started. A few seemed to be believers of supernatural activity, several were anxious to see something, others remained steadfast to their skeptical beliefs. Lainey grinned eager to experience something to tell her father, and Cece turned to Lizzie and Sabrina to recruit potential roommates.

"How haunted is it?" Her voice resounding with her British accent, Hermione Granger had had her experiences with ghosts in the past. "How many ghosts are there?"

"So far…" Melinda looked over to her. "I've counted seventeen…"

"You're psychic, aren't you?" Prue Halliwell looked to Melinda.

"Psychics read the future… I see ghosts…"

"Let's not worry about ghosts here, okay…" Christine had been searching the tables and drawers to gather pencils and index cards. "Look, I am a lawyer for the Manhattan Municipal Criminal Court Building in New York. Let's just find out who everyone is. Everyone, take a card, write down your name, birth date, address, room number where you can be found... oh, and today's date." She looked up to Alex and the girls on the landing over the piano. "I want you girls to give me the dates you appeared here. Next, we'll talk about getting ourselves out of here."

"If my friends, Leonard and Sheldon, were here, they could probably get us out of here." Penny quipped knowing their tenacity for building things, but she could also almost predict Howard's disgusting comment upon hearing about her being trapped in a hotel with beautiful girls. She took a pen and card and sat between Lainey Collins and Lily Finnerty on the sofa near the piano. Others sat on the floor at tables, Alex and the girls stood writing at the stairway railing, but Christine's plan to account for everyone was taking shape. Penny and Lily slowly looked to Lainey at the end of the sofa.

"You're Kelly Clarkson, aren't you?"

"You know…" Lainey kept writing without looking up. "If one more person asks me that, I'm bludgeoning them with a pencil and turning them into a ghost…"

Alex, Maddie and Gabriella looked down off the railing.

"Great… our first psychopath." Maddie retorted. "Now, we know who's going to kill us…" She wrote her name and address in Boston, following it with her birth date by her name and her room number at the bottom. Alex had listed her first day here as December 11, which meant it was December 16 when she had arrived. However, Gabriella had written down her first day as December 20. Could Alex had been alone here longer than she thought? Could they have missed Christmas and New Years Day? How far were they into January? One by one, they all finished their cards and gave them to Christine talking to Denise, the army wife. Hallie Parker was bonding with Lizzie McGuire as friends. Hermione had retreated to a sofa to write in a notebook she had found, but eventually everyone regrouped in the employee lounge behind the lobby area to eat their first meal of the day. Maddie had claimed they were down to twenty-two industrial cartons of eggs in the kitchen, but who ever had been here to deliver the new tenants to the place must have restocked their eggs and milk. It was just another mystery to add to the place. Helen did know how to make scrambled eggs in mass quantities with the kitchen equipment plus she knew how to use the other gear to stretch it by adding chopped onions, green peppers and grated cheese for omelets to feed fifty-eight. Working in this big hotel kitchen was kind of fun, but she did not want to be trapped doing it. Giving everyone free range to the kitchen was risky, but it seemed to be the best solution. After everyone had had their meet-and-greet breakfast and had their first-hand experience with the cold weather and snow stretched out around them, Christine gestured to Alex and lured her into the manager's office.

"Alex…" Christine guided the young lady into the office and closed the door. "Something even weirder is happening than you believe…"

"You're just now figuring that out…" Alex took a chair as Christine took the position at the desk. The cards filled out by the women in the Overlook had been stacked across the desk in ten stacks, the second one from the end was the tallest.

"These are the cards in order of when everyone arrived here." Christine placed her finger on the first one. "Think you were here first?"

"I know I was…" Alex was getting that creepy feeling again. "I spent five days here by myself without seeing anyone."

"Honey…" Christine flipped over the fifth card, which was Alex's then Maddie, Gabriella and Jessie's cards next to it. "You were here ten days…."

Lightly trembling, Alex's eyes started welling with tears. Ten days? Ten days by herself and her family never came looking for her? That was impossible! They loved her! Justin knew spells that could find her in seconds! How could they not come looking for her?

"What…" Her lungs filled and emptied with air as she wept. "How…" She choked up realizing her family wasn't looking for her. "Whose cards are before me?" She tried fighting the grief.

"Here's where it gets really weird…" Christine was not sure how to explain it. She showed Alex the first card. It read: "Rose Dewitt-Bukater (Dawson), born: October 11, 1890, Residence: 11456 Surrey Square, London, Middlesex County, England, Arrival: April 15, 1912, Room 236."

"Remember she was asking about other survivors?" Christine looked to Alex. "If I were to venture a guess, I'd say she thinks she was plucked off the Carpathia after getting rescued from the Titanic. That date…" She showed the card to Alex. "Is the day after the ship sank!"

"She was plucked out of history?" Alex realized out loud. Leaning forward, Alex flipped the next card. It read: "Joanie Cunningham, born: February 10, 1943, Address: 1612 Maple Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Arrival: January 13, 1960, Room 412."

"I met that girl twelve minutes ago…" Christine revealed. "She's eighteen!"

Third card: "Jaclyn/Jackie Burkhart, born: September 24, 1961, Point Place, Wisconsin, Current residence, Carnegie Apartments, Chicago, Illinois, Arrived: January 13, 1980…"

"Same day as today, twenty years apart…"

The next stack consisted of four cards for Sabrina Spellman, Prue Halliwell, Helen Chapel and Christine Sullivan… each dated January 13, 1993. Alex looked up to Christine.

"Except for Rose…" Christine revealed. "Everyone thinks it's the same day of different years… we've been abducted from out of space… and time… Jackie, Rose and Joanie have no idea what year it is yet, and… maybe us…" She sadly shook her head.

"What do you mean by that?" She looked to the cards before her. The next card was hers; Maddie, Gabriella and Jessie had the next stack as they should have ten days later of the same month. Sonny and Kat had the next day of arrival two days later. So did Teddy, Lily, Stella and Keely another two days later. The ninth stack was everyone who had appeared today on January 13, 2013. There was one more card at the end. Christine had already seen it. Alex was scared to pick it up and read it, but she forced herself to look at it.

"Victoria Elaine (Lainey) Collins, born September 13, 2000, address: 35 Seaview Road, Collinsport, Maine, Room 202, Arrived: January 13, 2018…"

Alex looked up in shock.

"Alex…" Christine looked as if she was in shock. "I think we're the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel…."


End file.
